FeedsAnywhere blogs

It's easy to subscribe to feeds

todd — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 01:15:23 +0000

RSS was in the news a lot this week thanks to Google's announcement that Reader is shutting down and it's prompted some discussion of Twitter vs. RSS. One knock on RSS is it's hard to subscribe to feeds. While browsers have made it more difficult to know if a feed exists Feedsanywhere makes it easy via a bookmarklet. Here's the text from one of our FAQs.

Q: How can I subscribe to feeds directly from any browser?

A: With the FeedsAnywhere bookmarklet you can subscribe to the news feed of many web sites with a single click. Right click on +FeedsAnywhere and select "Bookmark This Link", "Add To Favorites", or the equivalent for your web browser. I place the bookmark in my bookmark/links toolbar. From now on click on the bookmark to subscribe to the news feed for the current page. You must be logged into FeedsAnywhere for this to work.

You can also use the bookmarklet while viewing an RSS/Atom feed in your browser.

Importing from Google Reader

chadm — Fri, 15 Mar 2013 20:27:17 +0000

With this week's surprise announcement about Google Reader closing down at the beginning of July, it marks a good time to point out the easy way to switch from Reader to FeedsAnywhere.

1. Create a FeedsAnywhere account
2. Go to the Settings page
3. Check Google Reader Syncronization
4. Submit

You'll be asked to authorize access and FeedsAnywhere will start syncing your feeds. The process is simply and since it uses OAuth you won't even need to provide a username and password.

And since the syncing is two way, any changes you make will be reflected back to Google Reader (at least until they shut down) so if you want to give another site a try you haven't lost anything.

Feel free to drop us a line in the forums if you have any comments about FeedsAnywhere. We're always trying to improve.

Better Menus, Windows 8, and Bug Fixes

chadm — Fri, 07 Dec 2012 03:54:20 +0000

It's time for a roll-out of all the latest updates we have been working one. Many may not be immediately apparent depending upon the time of device or browser size you are using. On small screens the most noticeable change is an improvement to the menus to make them scrollable when they don't fit on the page. This should make them much more usable.

Another key update is better support for IE10 and an optimized tile icon for Windows 8.

Additional changes include fixes to what a visitor sees when not logged in, better duplicate detection, some enhancements for Opera Mobile, and correct star icon sizing in landscape mode.

4 Months of Updates

chadm — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 01:17:15 +0000

It's been exactly 4 months since the last major updates went live and, as you can probably imagine, there are quite a few. I won't go through every little bug fix, but I will highlight what you can expect to see changed.

First off is the icons and each item's footer. Many of the basic text links have been replaced with an icon that is both easy to use with a mouse and a touchscreen. In fact one of the biggest drivers for this was high DPI screens. When a browser reports a high pixel ratio the icons will all be scaled as well making them easier to see and select.

The icons themselves have also changed to reflect a cleaner and more consistent look. As with anything new they may take some adjusting to, but I think you'll like them after you do.

Icon positioning has also changed with the stars and thumbnails being centered when the title isn't much taller than them and oriented more towards the top if it is. I also included some optimizes to prevent unnecessary repositioning and resizing of the thumbnails that will prevent them from sometimes looking as if they jump around when expanding to collapsing an item.

How the content of an item is displayed has also been improved. Groups of images are more accurately positioned, floated images don't stack up on each other any more, and some cases where lists of items were getting compressed have been fixed.

You'll also notice that items will automatically be marked unread if their title changed. This was done to address some sites that seem to use the same URLs over again and also helps you see stories that have been updated with new content.

In the past the color of the item's title would turn purple when clicking through to the original site. That has been removed for various reasons and all titles will remain the same color.

And for the last change I will mention, the default view of the Select a Feed page will be whatever state it was last in. So if you click Manage Subscriptions and would prefer that those controls always be visible, they will. If you only want them to be temporarily visible just click the link again and they will disappear.

Thanks for being patient with us as we try to make FeedsAnywhere even better.

Back up and running

chadm — Sat, 18 Aug 2012 13:45:20 +0000

We apologize for any difficulties you had accessing the site yesterday. A server update ended up taking much longer than expected and, unfortunately, erased some data that necessitated going to the most recent back-up. So if you marked some items read, saved them, etc., and aren't seeing that reflected you know why.

Everything should be getting caught back up today, however we have a lingering with scoring items and grouping so if you use the Interesting view you won't have anything new there yet. We'll get that fixed ASAP.

Thanks for your patience.

Updates and Server Issues

chadm — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 20:59:20 +0000

We apologize if you tried accessing FeedsAnywhere earlier today and couldn't get through. Our server when down due to excessive load and it took a while to get running again. We made some configuration changes that should help avoid some of the problems we ran into.

In regular news, some bug fixes and other minor tweaks have been uploaded too.

Front Page Redesign, Login with Facebook, Google Reader Changes, and Bug Fixes

chadm — Sat, 26 Nov 2011 14:55:39 +0000

There are a lot of changes in this update, starting with a front page redesign to streamline it a bit and make the Feature Tour and Test Drive links more usable. We also added a login box directly to the front page to save an extra click, and while we were at it added Facebook Connect support so you can either login or create a new account using your Facebook credentials.

Selecting Login with Facebook the first time will open a new window from Facebook where you have to give permission for FeedsAnywhere to connect. From then on just clicking on the Login with Facebook button will log you onto FeedsAnywhere, assuming you are logged in to Facebook on the same browser of course.

A new Facebook tab will also appear in your user profile that gives you a way to unlink your Facebook account if you need to in the future and an optional check box to let your friends see that you have an account on FeedsAnywhere.

If you are a Google Reader user you've probably heard that Google Reader shared items have been removed in favor of sharing through Google+. Because of this we have removed the option of adding an item to your shared list. We'll working on adding Google+ support in the future. Email, Facebook, Instapaper, and Twitter sharing remain unchanged.

And finally there was a long list of bug fixes. Here is a sampling:
- Fixed a problem with the page count being wrong when not on page one.
- The jGestures plug-in will no longer be loaded when using IE8.
- Loading a page higher than one with no items will now show the navigation bar and the correct unread count.
- Mark Page Read is now hidden whenever it won't do anything.

The Latest Optimizations and Bug Fixes

chadm — Thu, 10 Nov 2011 22:33:57 +0000

I just rolled out a large list of changes that include performance and touch optimizations and bug fixes. Most of them are subtle touches like adding consistency to some color changes and tweaking behaviors so they are a little more appropriate for both touch and mouse interaction.

A few that you may be more interested in are:

- Touch gestures now work on Opera Mobile on Android, and on every other Android browser I've tested. The exception is changing the font size by pinching. I've only been able to get that working on the iPhone.

- Pinch to scale font size now works on a laptop with a touchpad capable of recognizing pinch events.

- An error will now be shown when a request times out. This will usually be due to a loss of network connection on a mobile device.

- Any item from the previous year will show the year in addition to the month and day.

Menu Changes and Better Support for Intermittent Connections

chadm — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 01:51:43 +0000

A new menu has been created to make navigation easier from the top of the page. Clicking the feed name will drop down a menu with entries like those at the bottom of the page. The existing settings menu that is accesses through the wrench icon has been widened.

All of the drop down menus will increase in size for iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone devices to make them more accessible by touch.

The other big change is the addition of a transaction queue. Any action you take, like marking an item read or saving a story, will be saved and if your Internet connection is lost those actions will be retried once a link is clicked after getting connected again. I have found this to be very valuable when using my Android phone since the connections get confused a bit switching between WiFi and HSPA+.

And as usual some miscellaneous bugs have been fixed.

Gestures, Flexible Font Sizes, and Animations

chadm — Wed, 10 Aug 2011 21:19:32 +0000

Today's update features some exciting new capabilities. For the first time FeedsAnywhere supports some touch screen gestures that will, hopefully, improve your mobile reading experience. If, for some reason, the presence of gestures is causing you problems there is a disable switch in the settings. I also added disable for favicons.

Supported Gestures

- Swipe left to expand or collapse the item while in Title View. This is especially useful when reading a long item that you want to get past because you won't have to scroll to the bottom before closing it.

- Long (edge-to-edge) swipe left will open the original URL.

- Swipe right will either mark the item read or unread.

- Pinch open will increase the font size.

- Pinch close will decrease the font size.

One note about the pinch gesture is that I've only found it to work on the iPhone so far, although presumably it would work on the iPad as well. I'm not sure if it is a limitation of some of the Android phones, or if there is a limitation to the library I'm currently using.

Don't worry if pinch doesn't work though, because a couple icons have been added to the bottom of the settings menu (wrench icon) that will also do it. This is the method if you want to change font size using a mouse. One difference between changing fonts and other settings is that it is specific to the browser and not a setting being saved on the server.

The final item you will notice are some smoother animations when expanding and collapsing items.