It's been a while since my last post, but progress continues. A recent change you may run across sometime is intended to improve the feed fetch frequency for the feeds you care about. It's pretty simple, if you view a feed and it hasn't been checked in the past 30 minutes it will be checked right then and you will be notified if new items were found.

The next step is getting pubsubhubbub support implemented so those feeds that support real-time notifications will be updated in FeedsAnywhere in real-time as well.

I'm pleased to report that managing categories is now possible through the Select a Feed page. The Manage Subscriptions link now adds an Add a Category option to each feed's menu and a new Show Category link is available in the bottom menu of each page.

Recently FeedsAnywhere was featured on WebWorkerDaily. If you'd like to read about some FeedsAnywhere features from a third party's point of view check out the article titled "FeedsAnywhere: A Mobile RSS Reader." Thanks to the new users who joined as a result of the WebWorkerDaily article. A few bugs were found and fixed so thanks for trying the beta.

We recently added the ability to Rename and Unsubscribe to feeds directly from the Select a Feed page. Just click the Manage Subscriptions link near the top of the page and it will expose the ability to import and export OPML files as well as a plus sign next to each feed.

Clicking one of those plus signs will open a menu that has Rename and Unsubscribe links.

Back in November I wrote about adding support for syncing feeds with Google Reader. I'm pleased to report that it has finally been extended to cover everything else I can think of: read status, starred items, shared items, and tagging items as interesting in Google Reader. Shared items will be marked as interesting if they aren't already.

I modified the initial loading of feeds get the main page displayed more quickly and the items are then populated asynchronously. In addition to returning the page more quickly you'll also notice that the current page number being viewed is present in the URL as a hash. Forcing a reload will now return you to the same page.

If you reload FeedsAnywhere you'll notice a new icon near the top right of the page. Clicking slides open a menu that opens up access to new sorting options and the ability to turn Title View previews on or off. There are also options for changing the view and which items are being shown.

Other new features are in the works for your reading pleasure, but hopefully this little bit of added control will help when the defaults get stale.

My recent focus has been on improving the speed and responsiveness of FeedsAnywhere. To that end I modified the interface to use more Ajax style loads rather than always refreshing the entire screen. Other elements (like unread counts in the menu) will appear after the page has been loaded vs. having to wait for them to complete first like you did before.

You can now sync you feeds with Google Reader. To activate it simply go to the Settings page, enter your Google username and password, check the Google Reader Syncronization box, and Submit. An initial sync will pull in everything you currently have in Google Reader and upload your subscriptions in FeedsAnywhere.

pubsubhubbub and rssCloud is now enabled for user's who decide to publish their interesting feed. This should help those who want to use other feed readers at times to have their content be more timely.

For now this support is as a publisher only. I still need to figure out how I want to implement it on the aggregator side.