As the quasi-PR person for Newshutch, I keep track of what people are saying about us. I do this by looking at referrer traffic, blog/forum comments, and with Feedgit.

One interesting post I recently saw on Feedgit was posted July 6, 2006 on a Spanish language blog. Mario Núñez, the author, posted what looks like a Spanish guide to using Newshutch. Poorly translated by me, the post title is almost Vader-esque: “An excellent way to begin to know the power of RSS“.

Someday we’d like to translate Newshutch into other languages, but until we have the time and budget, keeping things simple is a fair substitute. Before we launched, I was dreading writing the site copy. The way around the pain was to write as little as I could get away with, while still communicating what Newshutch is and why you’ll like using it. The combination of words and pictures turned out pretty well I think.

An added bonus is that it’s somewhat easier for non-English speakers to use Newshutch. When we do actual translations someday, we’ll have fewer words and interface elements to deal with. I love it when writer’s block pays off.

Doug and I were interviewed by Josh Owens and Chris Saylor of the Web 2.0 Show. They typically have high caliber guests, so it was a real thrill to be on their show.

A little “behind the scenes” trivia: In the original interview there was something of an awkward pause at about 17:05 after I go on an anti social software feature creep mini-rant, but Josh and Chris thankfully edited the awkward pause out. What I really meant to say was that instead of making tagging, tag clouds, friend groups, and all that stuff central to the Newshutch experience, we want to use the principles of social software in subtle ways. For example we could use categories as “tags” and “flagged” entries in interesting ways without explicitly making Newshutch a “social software” application.

Other highlights include Doug getting into the nitty gritty technical side of Newshutch, and me waxing ecstatic about how great it is to not have a boss. Many thanks to Josh and Chris. They were a lot of fun to talk to and excellent hosts.

Enjoy!

Web 2.0 Show Newshutch podcast and show notes.

No user interface design mistake bothers me more than when too much information is forced into a tiny non-resizable area. As usual, Microsoft is the worst offender.

Microsoft Money won’t let you see enough categories:

Internet Explorer’s settings pane forces you to scroll right:

Add hardware wizard makes you scroll a huge vendor list in a tiny space:

This is so frustrating because it smacks of lazy programming. Is it really that hard to make all windows resizable? Any time you force users to remember things instead of showing them what they are looking for it’s a UI failure.

Version 1 of Newshutch had this problem because too many important interface options were at the bottom of a huge feed list. If you checked feeds to delete, you would forget what you had checked by the time you reached the “delete” button. Since then we’ve added scrollable panes and we use fixed positioning (which doesn’t work in IE) for the “manage” options. I’m not saying Newshutch is perfect, but we aren’t worth billions and our add hardware wizard hasn’t sucked since 1995.

If you want to see some real doozies, check out the Interface hall of shame.

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

Newshutch has been not so quick lately, and by not so quick I mean that even simple queries would peg our database CPU at 100%. Well, that unusable mess should be all over now.

The only thing that still lags is when you pull up a feed with a lot of long unread items, but overall things are much better.

New features

• Independently scrolling panes option: Right now this just uses cookies so you’ll need to set this option for each new computer or browser you use. Someday we’ll make this option persist with your login.
• Collapsible categories: Right now these are just static open/close buttons to help you keep your place while you’re reading. If you close the window everything will open again. Like scrolling panes, we’ll eventually make these persistent.
• Better Printing: Feeds printed decently before, but I made some changes. I also forgot to ever mention it to users. It’s too bad that people expect web pages to print badly unless there is an explicit “printer friendly” page.
• Design changes: I moved some things around and added some things. I’ll leave it as a “Where’s Waldo” exercise for you

Enhancements/Fixes

• SPEED! I’m sitting here watching top report the DB CPU at 97% idle. Sweet. Is it just me or is watching a computer “breathe” via top hypnotic?
  Doug worked hard to get those queries (and a ton of other bugs) under control; somebody buy that man a beer!
• Mark everything read button is back (finally).
• Fixed favicon downloads. This was broken for a while so when new feeds were added they would be missing favicons. No need to re-add feeds though, if your favicons are available, we’ll get them for you.
• Fixed some parsing bugs. The annoying bug that prevented some feeds from showing their full content is fixed. We also fixed some other bugs related to OPML import/export.
• Better Opera support. It’s not perfect, but at least it renders now.
• Fixed Mac Firefox scrolling/ghosting issue. For anyone who cares, Mac Firefox didn’t like that I had set an overflow CSS property on the feed entries.
• There were other numerous bug fixes and tweaks too mind numbing to discuss here.

Things that aren’t fully baked

• Non latin characters in non-utf-8 feeds still don’t work.
• The keep unread checkbox doesn’t stay checked (woops).
• Flagging didn’t quite make it in this round.
• Various bugs related to parsing or importing troublesome feeds.

As always, thanks to everyone for their support and comments. Keep telling us what we can do better!

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.

Hi all,
Sorry about all of the ups and downs today but it looks like we’re good for the night.
The most current update addresses the serious case of the slowness you’ve most certainly noticed. We also have a new fancy-grade beefy database server on the way that will also make a major difference.

Most of the changes in this release are on the back-end but here are some UI and functionality changes/bug fixes we sneaked in:

• OPML import handles categories better and no longer barfs Rails stack traces
• Feed list animation and rendering bugs have been fixed
• Email address are actually parsed correctly now in the new user page
• Blog and Forum links now the top of the page

Because of the way we’re caching the feed list, we currently cannot change the unread counts based on what is selected in the “Show entries from” drop-down. However, when you select a feed, the entries you see are limited by the selected value the same as before. Getting the unread counts to change again is near the top of the list of things we’re addressing in the next rollout. The main page loads around a billion times faster now so the trade-off was an easy choice.
The “mark everything as read” link has also been removed because of database killing concerns, but will also be back in a future update.

Please let us know if you have any problems!

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.

Newshutch has been public for 6 days. We’ve gotten lots of high quality feedback. Many thanks to everyone who’s commented, told their friends, and used the application. When you build an application you develop blind spots; that’s why there’s no substitute for feedback from real users.

Officialy we just rolled out version 1.0.2, not that any of you should care about the version number. The best thing about web applications is that you don’t have to burn a million CDs, pack them into boxes with manuals, ship them to Office Depot, and pray that everyone buys upgrades. Instead, the next time you go to Newshutch it’s a little better and you didn’t have to install anything or (horror!) submit to a Windows Update.

New features in this version

• Browser button to add feeds: This is fantastic. Now you don’t have to go through the pain of copying and pasting web addresses into Newshutch. Now you just click “Add to Newshutch” in your browser toolbar and that’s all.
  
  [Update] I neglected to mention that for the browser bookmarklet to work, you need to stay logged in to Newshutch via the “Remember Me” checkbox. We’ll fix this in an upcoming revision.
  
• Keep unread: While this remains checked, the entry will remain “unread”.
  
• Filter entries based on freshness: I use this when I want to dig through “read” items, but I don’t want to see all the older entries.
  

Enhancements

• When showing both read and unread entries, the unread count appears instead of the number of all entries in a feed.
  
• There are also a number of back end enhancements that make the application more snappy and reliable.

Here’s an interesting blog post describing lots of neat things you can do with RSS feeds: 35 Ways You Can Use RSS Today.

Who doesn’t want to track drunk athletes?

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.