I knew this would happen sooner or later: ReadBurner is down. My Amazon instance crashed. Argh…
Most data is backed up, but maybe I will start all over again. Why? I made a wrong DB design decision right from the beginning, which I can’t easily change now. If I restart from scratch I could first implement it and improve my language filter.
What do you think?
I’ve been testing several feeds in the last weeks and came to the conclusion that for me the most useful feed has following parameters:
20 – Most Recent – Min Share 7 – English (for me off course)
The cool thing about this feed is, that everytime a story hits 7 shares Google Reader grabs it and since it’s Most Recent you will not get week old stories. The noise is very low, it’s about 20 stories a day and if ReadBurner gets more traction you can raise the min share parameter.
What kind of feed settings do you like the most? I want to make something like a HotFeed.
Hey guys. I did some backend work the last days. There are some bugs in the parser and I still have to get the caching done. When I’m done with that I’m gonna release a new kind of navigation to make ReadBurner simple again. Ah ja. I’m hearing the requests for other languages. I’m working on it…
For those who didn’t saw it: I released a RSS Feed wizard and a new filter called minimum shares. Hope you like it!
I have integrated a feature to share items on ReadBurner without having to subscribe to the Feed first. Louis Gray led me to this idea with his recent article Add Items to Your Google Reader Link Blog Without Subscribing.
How does it works:
You hit the share button and then the Google Reader will open with only 1 item in it – the item you want to share. Instead of subscribing to the feed you just open the item, hit share and close the Google Reader. It’s a little bit complicated – but hey, it works 😉
What do you think? Should I make use of this feature and add some code to check things that you’ve already shared?
Just want to let you know that I’m currently not adding new linkblogs. I save them all but I cannot keep up. Tomorrow I’m gonna add them all 🙂
I’ve integrated another filter to show items with a minimum definable share count. It’s not yet integrated into the interface. Sorry folks – I just need some rest. You can still use and play around with it by manipulating the Get Parameters in the URL. Just add &ms=3 for a minimum share count of 3 shares. This is particularly interesting for the most recent section. You can hide away all the one time shared items.
The parameter also works for the RSS feeds. Here’s an example for Most Recent | English | min 3 shares
There’s another little update for the RSS feeds: you can now see the Autho, the Source and how many people shared it right in Google Reader. That’s all for today.
Oh. One more thing…
I’ve played around with images again since I didn’t like the old view. Now I’m giving you a view showing just raw images with nothing else. No Titles, shares, Authors or text, just what’s hot today as totally unorganized Image stream.
I call it Visual News. You can see it here.
What do you think?
Sorry for slow ReadBurner updates but my Server had great problems handling the traffic in the past 12 hours, since Lifehacker and Google Operating System send me tons of traffic.
I’ve integrated some optimizations and some caching. That should help.
There are also more than 100 hundred Linkblogs in the queue, which I haven’t been including so far. I’m gonna add them in the next few hours and bring the feed update cycle back to 15 minutes.
Today was really exciting for me. I often heard – if you’ve got scaling problems you’ve done something right … hehe.
It’s gonna be interesting on how this develops, after this peak.
I’m testing Google AdSense on ReadBurner.
Since I’m building this service on top of a Google product it just seems obvious also to use Google’s core revenue product – Google AdSense. And if ReadBurner continues to grow I need to find a way to pay my server bills anyway.
I’m interested in the ad relevance, since there’s a lot of content to potentially analyze on ReadBurner.
I hope the ads are not too disturbing for you…
The long awaited and promised first Design iteration is now online. Until now ReadBurner looked somehow cheap and uninspired and I’m not sure if you’re gonna like the new Design, but as you already know – I can improve fast. So don’t hesitate to give me feedback.
I have integrated a new feature – Content Preview.
You can decide if you want no Content, a text snippet, a text snippet plus images or the full content. The last two are highly experimental and I’m very interested in the reactions. They can produce strange behaviour too, since I haven’t integrated any methods to analyze the text.
The reason why I have integrated it: it happened accidentally, while programming that stuff and I really liked the look of the text+image preview. I thought it would be cool to find a way to get this style, without the errors that are now in it…
Nevertheless –Â I can gonna remove or improve it based on your feedback.
One last note: I wanna thank all of you bloggers, users, contributors for writing about ReadBurner, giving feedback and mailing me bugs. That really keeps me motivated. Special kudos to Louis Gray – for “forcing” me to go online…
I’ve done some work today 🙂
RSSÂ Feeds:
Finally the RSS feeds have language filtering. Here are some examples:
English Most Recent:
http://www.readburner.com/rss.php?s=mr&l=1Asian Currently Popular:
http://www.readburner.com/rss.php?s=cp&l=2Persian Most Recent:
http://www.readburner.com/rss.php?s=mr&l=3
You can subscribe to them easily over the buttons. They automatically recognize the current language.
Stats
I’m beginning to implement some stats. For this update I have implemented it on a stats page which shows Top Linkblogger, Top Sources, Top Authors, and Recently Added Linkblogger. In next releases I’m gonna implement many more stats for every clickable thing (user, source, author, general,…).
Since I’m a familiar with Adobe flex charting I will also bring you some nice charts a la Google Analytics in future.
The reason why I’m not highlighting those stats is because they are slow. I have to implement some sql caching first. If you don’t find the stats – they are next to the About and Blog Link.
More tomorrow. I’m going to sleep now…
Alexander Marktl 