Making Logins Last Longer

Previously, FeedsAnywhere would required relogging in between visits if your cookie expired or was removed, which could be a real pain when accessing the site using a phone. You should now see an improvement with logins lasting for much longer if you click the Remember Me link when logging in. If any of you have any problems please let me know.

A Better Title View Experience

I spend most of my time using Title View and one thing that has consistently annoyed me is opening an item only to have to scroll around a lot so I can read it. I had previously looked into fixing it, but could never quite figure it out. Well that finally changed this week,

Now when you click an item to expand it a check is made on how tall the item is an scrolls the page so it either all fits or it's at the top of the page. It's a simple change, but hopefully one that will help you read entries more efficiently.

Improved Interface Scalability

From the beginning one of the primary goals of FeedsAnywhere has been to have a single interface that can scale for any size screen, but we recently hit a snag with one feature. As we were optimizing for a couple popular phones (Apple iPhone and BlackBerry Storm) we introduced some code that scales all images so they fit the width of the screen and don't introduce a horizontal scrollbar. The great news was that it worked on the phones in question, but didn't work with a desktop browser like Firefox or Opera.

Faster Searches

I often find the need to search through my feeds to find stories on a particular topics or reference an article that I previously read. In most cases the performance wasn't to bad, but the more items there were the slower it got.

I'm pleased to report that after a little optimization work we identified the problems and a search should now be just as fast as any other page. Enjoy!

Marking a Page Read

Marking a page read even when there was only a single page of items used to still require a page reload resulting in a no unread items message. I've now fixed this so the items are marked in place without forcing the extra wait time.

Interface Changes

I uploaded some interface changes recently that change some of the basic interactions. The disk icon was removed and a star added to the left of each item's title. Starring an item provides the same functionality that saving did before. This coincides with a backend change that is setting FeedsAnywhere up for future Google Reader integration. I'll be gradually adding to that capability so stay tuned.

OPML Export

I please to annouce that OPML Export is now supported in FeedsAnywhere. We have supported importing an OPML file for a long time, but exporting never quite made it to the top of my to-do list...until now.

OPML files allow you to transfer your list of feeds between different readers.

Get Your Interesting Items From Any Feed Reader

When you login to FeedsAnywhere and view your Interesting page you'll now see a Publish link next to the title. Selecting this allows you to create a feed from your Interesting items that can be accessed by any other feed reader. We decided to enable this capability so those of you who sometimes want to use another reader can still benefit from the recommendations of our FeedScore program.

New Blog and Forum

Now that FeedsAnywhere is useable for day-to-day feed reading (although some of us have been using for a while now) we thought it was time to open up the communication on what we are doing and start providing a better two way path to receive feedback on what we are doing right and where we need to improve.

As part of that we are starting a new Forum to facilitate further conversation. You can always find a link to it in the page footer.

That's all for now, but in the future we'll be back to talk about new features and tips for getting the most out of FeedsAnywhere.

Syndicate content

Navigation

j/k selects the next/previous item in the list
n/p in title view, selects the next item without opening it
space/shift+space moves to the next/previous page
shift+m open/close the main menu
shift+o open/close the options menu
enter select the highlight entry from a menu

Actions

enter,o in title view, expands or collapses the selected item
shift+a marks all items in the current page as read
d go to the item's list of similar stories
i/u designate the item as interesting/not interesting
m marks the item as read or unread
s adds or removes a star from the selected item
shift+s open/close the item's share menu
shift+u marks all items in the current page as unread
v opens the original source for the item in a new tab

Go To a New Page

g then h go to the homepage
g then i go to the Interesting items view
g then a go to the All items view
g then s go to the Saved items view
g then p go to the Popular items view
g then f go to the Select a Feed page

Application

- decrease the font size
= increase the font size
esc close any menu if open, otherwise deselect all items
? open/close a decription of keyboard shortcuts