July 14th, 2006
by NathanNew feature: Cook eggs on the Newshutch server
You may have noticed a bit of a slowdown on Newshutch. A lot of people have started using it since we launched nine days ago, so our server is running a little hot.
The good news is that Doug is just about to roll out some updates that should alleviate the slowdown and fix some of the nagging OPML issues we’ve been seeing.
Thanks to everyone for giving Newshutch a try and special thanks to everyone who has written in with praise, suggestions, and bug reports.
UPDATE - July 15th 9:20pm - Thanks to a link from 37signals and then an appearance on the del.icio.us popular list, the slowdown has turned into a near meltdown. The blog and forum are fine, but the newsreader is way too slow to use. We ordered a more robust server and some coming code updates should alleviate the slowdown. We hope to be back to normal on Monday.
UPDATE - July 17th 1:29am - We are back up thanks to a heroic effort by Doug, but we aren’t at 100% yet. Things are still a bit slow. Our new server just came online, so once we migrate tomorrow we should be back in action.
July 14th, 2006 at 12:55 pm
I’m glad to hear the slow down is not on my end and that it’s not a serious problem on yours.
I’ve been looking for a feedreader for several months now and hadn’t really found anything that really met my needs, until now that is. Great work and once the speed issues are corrected it will be even better.
Sticking with you all for awhile, don’t dissapoint please! =)
July 14th, 2006 at 2:20 pm
Maybe it’s not the place, but I don’t see a feedback form, so just wanted to say that you have a nice site but as I understand no multilanguage support at all?! At least the Cyrillics Russian not working and there’s only “???? ????” instead
July 14th, 2006 at 2:30 pm
I’m glad to see stuff speeding up already. EIther you worked some magic, or people backed off.
July 14th, 2006 at 3:42 pm
Hey guys,
I was hoping to give your reader a try, but when I imported my Bloglines OPML, my feeds lost their folder/category information. Any chance that the Newshutch importer might be modified to handle this case?
Best wishes,
Topher
July 14th, 2006 at 4:45 pm
Really impressive so far. With a nice simple export/import from bloglines you could eat their lunch by this time next week - but only if you speed the site up. It’s unusably slow right now! You’ve just been linked by 37signals so strike while the iron’s hot and buy another server!
July 14th, 2006 at 6:04 pm
Well, thanks to 37signals exposure (which is a good problem to have), we put in an order for a beefier server. We’ll probably have to colo before too long.
July 14th, 2006 at 6:47 pm
Hi guys great app - Newsgator is my old newsreader now
Curious, is newshutch Ruby on Rails?
July 14th, 2006 at 7:25 pm
Ry, yep, it’s RoR.
July 14th, 2006 at 9:03 pm
You guys are doing a great job with Newshutch thus far. Quite interested in seeing where the application goes from here.
Do you have a plan laid out, which explains the general direction that you are headed?
July 14th, 2006 at 10:15 pm
Scott, our plan is to make Newshutch the easiest and most fun to use web based newsreader out there. Newshutch exists because Doug and I were unsatisfied with the current crop of newsreaders. We are eating our own dog food.
We also wanted to build something that “normal” people could understand and use. Even though there are lots of newsreaders and we are a late entry, I believe we can reach the 99.236% of people who have never heard of RSS, and really, shouldn’t ever have to hear about it.
July 15th, 2006 at 3:35 am
Yes! This is incredible. Fantastic work guys. But please please please please fight the inevitable feature requests. Simple is beautiful (and complex is Bloglines). Looking forward to the new server.
July 15th, 2006 at 5:00 am
This is _exactly_ what I’ve been looking for, much better than bloglines. It is quite slow though. Hope you get that new server soon!
July 15th, 2006 at 3:57 pm
Nathan,
The simplicity and ease of use among feed readers is unrivaled. I use flock for my feed reading needs because it is simple and effective. When they finally released OPML exporting in one of their nightly builds your website was my first stop. I hope the slowness issues get fixed soon!
However, one of my biggest concerns is being able to save posts for later. Instead of just using the “Keep Unread” – which leaves the post under the same category/feed… It would be very beneficial to the entire Newshutch userbase to have a saved articles category in which they could easily reference all the posts that they have deemed as interesting. Drag and drop support would be AMAZING and simple for this feature. It would eliminate clutter blah blah COOL blah blah never been done.
July 15th, 2006 at 3:59 pm
Anthony, saving posts for later, or at least keeping them marked as unread is coming in the next revision. The slowness issue will hopefully be resolved by Monday.
July 15th, 2006 at 4:10 pm
The server issue is really start bugging me off. Registrated for about 40 mins ago. But I can’t add custom feeds, only the prelisted. Please fix this soon. And it would be nice with some real Firefox plugin, not a simple bookmark.
Birger
July 15th, 2006 at 4:37 pm
Do to recent events. It was only the DailyTech feed that got messed up
Thank you for this marvelous aggreator
(Misspelled words 
)
Birger
July 15th, 2006 at 4:56 pm
Nathan,
Thanks for the response. It sounds like you guys have a pretty good handle on where you are going. Do you have any plans to post some of the technical aspects of how you built Newshutch for us curious types?
July 15th, 2006 at 9:29 pm
Scott,
Once things cool down a post about how we tried to melt our server and what we did about it would be fun for the whole family.
July 16th, 2006 at 5:24 am
I’m one of those people who came here from 37Signals. I’ve been looking for a good web based newsreader for awhile, but none have been very good for what I want. Yours looks like it could be perfect. I hope you get the speed issue fixed soon.
July 16th, 2006 at 2:37 pm
Fantastic work so far!
I have always held off using a feedreader simply because whenever I tried one, I felt like they were built to infuriate me.
I’m loving the simple layout and ‘just enough’ features - though I did manage to accidentally mark all of my feeds as read. Maybe a confirmation popup could prevent that happening in the future?
July 16th, 2006 at 11:31 pm
Yes its an awesome application… only thing to put my finger on is that because its running so slow due to max usage (GRATZ!) then put more ajax indicators on for when it does stuff, for instance when u mark stuff as read.
Keep up the good work
July 16th, 2006 at 11:54 pm
Oh ya, that’s much better guys. Good work correcting the speed issue and adding blog and forum thinks to the top of the page.
July 17th, 2006 at 5:47 am
Ah, wonderful - It’s much snappier now!
July 17th, 2006 at 7:30 am
Nathan,
Drop me an email, I would love to chat with you about your product. Perhaps we could sit down for an interview on the web 2.0 show?