Sorry about the downtime today. Our hosting company had a blown router.

Sorry about the downtime Saturday night from about 10:15pm to 1:30am. We’re looking into the cause of the outage, so we’ll let you know what happened. Thanks for being patient.

Steps:

1. Notice that site has become really slow the last few days.
2. Stumble upon a fantastic resource by Ian Gilfillan for people with limited MySQL experience.
3. Slap forehead and finally turn on slow query logging to find queries that take more than one second.
4. Realize that, oh crap, we’re reading every row in the session id table constantly.
5. Add an index to the session id table to fix that.
6. Try to fix other expensive queries that use sorting.
7. Fix those by upping the startup variables that effect sorting cache.
8. Forgive self for rookie mistakes because I’m a CSS jockey not a DBA.

Some of you IE users may have noticed that when you try to use the browser bookmarklet button “Add to Newshutch” directly on an XML (or RSS, or Atom, etc…) feed, the bookmarklet fails.

For some reason, IE doesn’t like javascript bookmarklets when the page in the view port is XML. It just fails silently. I tried using the bookmarklet on images and even local files and IE would at least make the submission to Newshutch.

Perhaps we’ll be able to fix this by using a referrer or something, but I’d much rather browbeat every Windows user into switching to Firefox.

Fortunately this problem only effects 10% of Newshutch users:

Sheesh, I can’t believe I spent all that time figuring out why Opera wouldn’t render feeds at full opacity

Finally! Thanks to everyone for being patient. Now we can stop putting out fires and start making things better. We should have never tried to get away with running our database and web server on a single server, and we learned that lesson the hard way. Now we’re running the web server off the older server and the database has the new beefy dual processor box.

Everyone should be able to see a big difference in responsiveness. Let me know how it works for you guys.

In lieu of our new server being up and you all enjoying a better, stronger, faster Newshutch (sorry about the delay), how about a screen shot of user interface features I’ve been working on?

Can you spot the updates? I’ll give one away because I don’t want anybody to freak out: Independently scrolling panes. Yes it’s an option and not a default, and yes, it’s done with style sheets and javascript instead of icky frames.

I’m not sure when these will roll out, our first priority is to get back to “fast” with all previous features re-enabled.

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.

Hi there, welcome to the Newshutch blog. You probably know by now that Newshutch is a web-based news feed reader. If Newshutch is your first feed reader, congratulations! Getting the information you care about is about to become much easier. You won’t have to repeatedly check your favorites to see what’s new; what’s new will just come to you.

If you already use another news reader why should you switch?

Reader run-around

There are plenty of free and excellent desktop newsreaders, but their flaw is that they are tied to the computer they are installed on. When I went back and forth between work and home computers, I couldn’t sync my feed list and read or unread status without laboriously exporting everything, carrying the data on a USB drive, and importing everything. If I didn’t do everything just right every time, the system broke down. I also had to keep both installations of my newsreader up to date, and using Windows at work and a Mac at home was not an option.

Yuck.

Into the breach

The obvious solution is a web based newsreader. Today there are dozens of them out there, but they all seem to have the same problems:

• Tiny, hard to read fonts.
• An overwhelming number of links and irrelevant features.
• As feeds are added the interface becomes noisier. Using your reader becomes a chore instead of fun.
• “Normal” people (non web developers) see the front page of other newsreaders and say “huh?”

With Newshutch we’ve done our best to solve these problems, but we can always do better. That’s why we’ll listen to you on this blog and in our user forums. Thanks for giving Newshutch a try, we think you’ll like it.