Mavericks Push Notifications

by Ben Ubois

OS X Mavericks was released on Tuesday and it has a cool feature that allows websites to send push notifications to your Mac.

Feedbin can now take advantage of this by offering push notifications for new articles.

To set it up you will need to be using Safari 7 on Mavericks. Then visit the Feeds page under Settings and there will be an option to enable push notifications. Click that and choose to allow Feedbin to send push notification in the resulting pop-up.

Next you will need to select which feeds you want to enable push for in the Feed Settings list. It’s a per-feed setting because enabling this for all feeds would be overwhelming.

Clicking on a notification will open up the original article and mark the article as read in Feedbin.

Saved Searches

by Ben Ubois

Any search can now be saved for quick access later. To create a saved search, start by searching for something, hit save and give your search a title.

There’s a saved searches API, if you want to do something with the data other than view it in Feedbin.

Search Beta

by Ben Ubois

I’m very happy to announce the availability of search for Feedbin.

I’m calling it a beta because there are still improvements to be made and bugs that have not been found, so I’d appreciate your feedback.

Search supports some great advanced options like AND, OR and NOT.

Have a lot of starred items? Try adding is:starred to your query to just search starred items. is:read/unread are also supported.

To search a specific feed, you can add AND feed_id:XX.

Results are is sorted by relavance by default, but you can optionally sort by date with sort:asc/desc.

Under the hood Feedbin is using elasticsearch to power all of this.

Due to the new field, subscribe has been moved and can be accessed by clicking on the dropdown next to search.

Pair With Me

by Ben Ubois

I read Frank Chimero’s “The Inferno of Independence” yesterday. It’s a great article, and while I generally have poor reading comprehension, something resonated with me which is that “independence is lonely.”

I’ve been thinking that one thing I miss when working on Feedbin is the opportunity to work with others. Open sourcing Feedbin has helped make the work a bit more social, but I’m still left wanting more.

So I have an experiment I’d like to try.

Do you have an idea for a feature or a bug you would like to fix, but aren’t sure how to approach it or you would like to work on it with someone else? If so, why don’t we work on it together?

To set something up, just send me an email with what you’d like to work on and when you’re available.

The only thing I would ask is that you already have Feedbin running locally and have Screenhero and Skype installed.

Format Toolbar

by Ben Ubois

The format toolbar has some options for styling the look of articles. There’s a couple of nice font choices including Whitney and Sentinel both from Hoefler & Frere-Jones. You can also change the font size and make the text full width.

Todd is starting to Dribbble some Feedbin design stuff so go check out his page to see what’s in the works.

Feedbin is Open Source

by Ben Ubois

I spend a lot of time thinking about how to compete with free. I believe the answer is to change the meaning of the word, so starting today Feedbin is free as in freedom.

I think there are many great reasons to make Feedbin open source, but my main reasons are:

  • I want your help.
  • I like transparency and there’s nothing more transparent than being able to view source.
  • It makes it so Feedbin cannot pull a Google Reader.

Tom Preston-Werner of GitHub wrote a great article outlining some of the pros of open sourcing software and I’m hoping to reap those benefits as well.

Mostly I’m just excited to see what happens. It should be a cool experiment.

I wanted to thank Karl Fogel for his help making this happen. He literally wrote a book on producing open source software and is in the process of revising it so it was great to have him as an advisor. Also thanks to Alex Kessinger and Samuel Clay for their encouragement and help.

Graphing Feedbin

by Ben Ubois

Feedbin uses Librato Metrics for graphing. It even works well for monitoring systems. For example this shell script generates a set of graphs for one of the web servers like:

For monitoring various other services, Feedbin uses a ruby script that gets run once per minute using Sidekiq.

This produces some great metrics about Redis, Postgres and Memcached:

Speed

by Ben Ubois

Feedbin now preloads content which makes it pretty much instant to load articles.

This is the biggest improvement in perceived performance yet and brings Feedbin close to my personal goal of native app responsiveness.

Try it out now.

Tag Management

by Ben Ubois

You can now rename and delete tags in Feedbin.

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