by Ben Ubois
Tag Drawers are rolling out today.
Tag Drawers show you what feeds belong to a tag. Whether you like to keep the drawer closed or open, Feedbin will remember your preference.
To complement Tag Drawers there is a new setting to hide any feed that belongs to a tag from the main feeds list. This is useful if you don’t want tagged feeds showing up in two places.
by Ben Ubois
There is now an optional RSS feed of your starred items available. To enable it, visit your settings page and check the “Enable starred entry feed” option. After saving your settings a link to your starred RSS feed will be displayed.
The URL will look something like https://feedbin.com/starred/Lx3E5w94M3mOKFtcttHK8w.xml the part at the end is a unique random value assigned to your feed. The URL to your starred feed is not easily guessable, but anyone with your URL can view your feed.
I use this feed to automatically add starred entries to Pinboard. You can do this too using IFTTT. To set this up you’ll want to create a new “Feed” recipe.
{{EntryUrl}}{{EntryTitle}}Now any new entries you star will show up in Pinboard. IFTTT offers many other actions you can perform on an RSS feed so I encourage you to check it out.
by Ben Ubois
This morning I performed a database upgrade. The reason for the upgrade was to have more RAM available to the database indexes. One important performance metric for databases is the percentage of the index that can be kept in memory. This number should be as close to 100% as possible and over the last week, Feedbin’s had dropped to 94%. Time for an upgrade.
The database upgrade went smoothly, taking only about 6 minutes. However immediately after bringing the site back up, there were many connection timeout errors in the logs. The frustrating part was that the timeouts seemed random. There was still plenty of traffic getting through, but for many people, including me, the site was completely inaccessible.
One thing that stood out to me was how long database queries were taking after the upgrade, for some reason the new database was slower than the old one. I’m still trying to figure out why this is, but I’m thinking that the database takes time to figure out what it needs to keep in its cache. I believe that connections were timing out due to how long the database was taking to respond.
I’m sorry about any inconvenience this may have caused and will take extra precautions next time something as critical as the database is being upgraded.
by Ben Ubois
Feedbin will be offline starting at 11:00 PDT this Saturday, April 6th 2013. The maintenance window should last a few minutes.
The reason for the maintenance is to upgrade the database server to add more cache capacity. The new database is already configured as a slave to the master database. The downtime is to ensure that the slave is fully caught up before making it the new master.
This upgrade is necessary to keep Feedbin fast but may even speed it up a little.
by Ben Ubois
The positive feedback and encouragement I’ve received about Feedbin has been amazing. I couldn’t ask for better customers. Thank you.
The top priority is keeping Feedbin running and making sure your feeds are up-to-date.
There are now 56,710 unique feeds to check, which is an exciting problem to have. Luckily this is a task that can be massively parallelized thanks to on-demand server resources. Feeds are staying current, but improvements are still in the works to stay ahead of the growth.
There are a number of features customers can’t live without, and I wanted to let you know some of what’s coming.
Feedbin is young, and I’m as excited as anybody to watch it mature.
by Ben Ubois
Silvio let me know on Sunday, March 24th, my 29th birthday, that Reeder was going to add Feedbin support. I couldn’t ask for a better gift.
Reeder is my favorite and most used app and I’m thrilled that Feedbin customers will be able to use it with Feedbin.
by Ben Ubois
You can now view the original content of an entry inline. This is great for link blog style feeds like Daring Fireball or Hacker News.
Click on the ragged right text icon next to the star in an entry or press the c key to use.
by Ben Ubois
There is now a $20/year billing option for Feedbin.
You can change plans at any time and your subscription will be pro-rated, meaning any service you have already paid for will be discounted on your new plan.
Go to your billing page to change plans or sign up now.
by Ben Ubois
Feedbin now has a proper mobile view. Add it to the home screen of your mobile device for the best experience.
by Ben Ubois
Today was a good day for Feedbin. Feedbin is a very new service (we launched on Tuesday) so it didn’t get lots of write-ups like some of the other feed readers that have been around longer. Some other stats: