You may notice that the detail pages are now ad-supported. I would have implemented this weeks ago, but Google was very slow to approve our AdSense account.
We’re not trying to make a killing here — in fact our first goal is just to cover the cost of hosting. . . .
We also implemented Google Analytics so we can track site usage.
Right now the ads aren’t targeting themselves correctly — apparently that takes 48 hours to kick in, so stay tuned.
In response to some complaints from my hosting company and registrar that we were using too much CPU and bandwidth, I’ve moved feedhaus from a virtual dedicated server to a dedicated server.
I think Lucene was the culprit — as FUD was indexing feeds’ articles, Lucene was consuming WAY too much CPU. Anyway, after a 24 FUDless hours, FUD is happily chugging away to bring you new stories from the 70+ feeds we now have in feedhaus.
I’m very happy to say that I was able to move feedhaus and FUD over to the new hardware with only 30 minutes of web site downtime. W00t!
This incident led me to thinking a bit about scaling feedhaus. My fears about the scalability of cometd/long-polling are probably unwarranted. What I should really worry about is FUD. I think ultimately FUD needs to be separated out from the web server machines so that it doesn’t interfere with web site performance. Furthermore, I think the feed table should probably be broken into segments and there should be a new FUD process instantiated for every 100 (or so) feeds.
I guess FUD and I will cross that bridge when we get to it . . . but for now, performance is snappy as ever AND you’re getting your news in near-realtime. Enjoy!
The podcast returns (after another six month hiatus) with an interview of feedhaus developer Andrew Bays. If you’re interested in the inner workings of feedhaus or in finding out what’s coming soon, I highly recommend that you give it a listen.
Here are some notes from the show, which include links to most of the topics we covered. Andrew started by describing his background. He began his programming career as a volunteer developer on the Tsunami Virtual World MUD. (I commented that I was really into a MUD back in the day, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy Adventure Game.)
We started talking a bit about Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 and how this had led bdg to conceive and develop a social news site called feedhaus. He described some nuts and bolts stuff, including how he leveraged Dojo and Comet to build the real-time features in feedhaus. (As an aside, Andrew mentioned how one of our west coast developers, Brendan Budine, ran into Alex Russell at BEA World. Alex was really excited to hear about our use of Comet in feedhaus!)
We talked about other companies who use Comet (or Comet-like functionality involving long-polling or continuations) and meebo came up in the discussion. We continued by going into a discussion about some of the myriad other technologies that make feedhaus possible. Here’s a partial list:
We closed the conversation by talking about tag clouds and the feedhaus implementation of the history slider, which was inspired by the Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud. This reminded me of another tangentially-related project, the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine.
Enjoy the show and post your comments here or send an e-mail to [email protected].
Nearly every new user who gets on feedhaus has the same question: can I narrow the tag cloud down to only the topics/tags that I care about? My answer is no, not yet, but soon! How soon this happens is anyone’s guess, but let me update you on the progress of our newest features:
1. Search
This feature made the top of our list because you really can’t have personalization or profiling without first opening up access to all the tags in feedhaus. (In case you haven’t already noticed, only the top 100 are showing on the home page.) We’re designing search so that you can easily find feeds, articles (current or past), tags and users. The search is powered by a great, turnkey opensource search engine called Lucene.
2. Personalization
This has been the most requested feature to date. And it’ll be here . . . soon! You’ll be able to create as many personal tag clouds as you want and drag the tags you want to watch into each tag cloud. You’ll be able to name these personalized tag clouds and share them with your friends, essentially allowing you to design your own constantly up-to-date news site.
3. User Profiling and Social Networking
The user profile feature will allow you to see what other people are tagging and what feeds they’re adding (if they choose to share). You can also browse other people’s tag clouds and copy them, adding your own tags or removing those you don’t care about. If you like another person’s “taste” in the news, you can add them as a friend. Lastly, we all love a competition, so we’re adding a “top contributor” page and showing each person’s rank, which will be calculated based on how many feeds he or she has added.
Be on the lookout for these new features and, as always, leave your comments here or drop us a line at [email protected].
We made a few notable changes, including revamping the “add a feed” page by adding clearer feedback and better instructions. We also made the feed adding, indexing and aggregating a lot more robust by fixing some bugs deep within the feed processing engine.
We’re trying our best to emphasize that this is a social news site, so we added the orange button (on the right) to encourage people to add their own content.
Coming in the next alpha build: the much anticipated search feature, along with perhaps some personalization and/or user profiling bits. More about these new features to come….
We’ve put the “Alpha 1” build up and removed the password protection, which marks the beginning of the feedhaus public alpha!
In this build, we’ve repaired a lot of the IE problems (although there are still a few sneaky issues) and revamped the forms along with other parts of the UI. The “add a feed” page is much more robust now — if you enter a web site URL instead of a feed URL, it will actually search the page for one or more feed URL(s) and pre-populate the form for you. (Thanks Andrew for implementing this great feature.)
We’ve also changed our slogan from “What’s Hot Now” to “Be the First to Know.”
One known issues is that the history slider is still a little wonky and it will be for several days (until enough snapshots exist for it to scroll smoothly). This problem will be with us for about a week or so and then it will work itself out. Think of it as feedhaus’ “growing pains.”
So, have at it, folks!
And please report problems and suggestions by commenting on this blog or sending an e-mail to [email protected].