Toluu Blog

Delete feeds working again

Caleb Elston — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 16:51:24 +0000

There was a bug that was causing the ‘Delete feeds’ option in ‘Account’, to fail. We have fixed this bug so you will now be able to delete all of your feeds.

It is a new year, and many users are starting their feed lists from scratch. Maybe you want to as well?

Heads down and working

Caleb Elston — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 14:49:27 +0000

You may have noticed that the blog has been awfully quiet the past month. We have been focused on building some great new things for Toluu that require more time to develop than some features we have done in the past.

Know that we continue to make bug fixes, invite new users, and answer emails. We are simply being quiet about what we are working on. We think you will like it when it is released

New Option: Delete your feeds

Caleb Elston — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 13:31:52 +0000

Just a quick note. We have introduced the ability for you to clear your feeds.

If you accidently uploaded the wrong feed list, or have made huge changes to your list, or you just want to start over, this new functionality will allow you to do just that.

The new functionality can be found by going to ‘Account’. Be careful deleting your feeds, since we can’t recover them.

Toluu launches Tagging!

Caleb Elston — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 16:04:06 +0000

Today is a big day, we have just rolled out the largest update to Toluu since launch. We have been working on this for a while now, and hope you like it.

Toluu now has Tagging!

Tagging has been our #1 most requested feature and we wanted to make sure we really tailored the experience to fit Toluu, not just bolt on some frankenstein system and call it a day. The goal has been to make tagging super simple to use and pervasive across the site. Now let’s jump into how it works!

On every feed page there is a new tab called ‘Tags’. We start with a nice big text box for entering tags. We have used Ajax to make adding tags snappy. There are three other sections as well; ‘My Tags’, ‘Top Tags’, and ‘Similar Feeds’.

‘My Tags’ shows you how you have tagged this feed and also allows you to update your tags with in-line editing goodness.
‘Top Tags’ shows the most popular tags for the feed across the Toluu universe.
‘Similar Feeds’ scours all of the feeds in Toluu and compares the tags to find relevant matches, providing another way to discover interesting new feeds.

There is also a cool feature we call AutoSuggest, when typing a tag, we suggest tags based on your past tagging behavior. This makes it faster to enter tags, and helps keep your feeds organized.

Now, the real magic happens when you click on a tag. This will bring up a new view which shows feeds that also have that tag. Finding all of the Apple blogs or Microsoft blogs with 1-click is super cool. We heard from the community that we needed more ways to sort feeds, so we have rolled out site-wide sort options to *all* feed lists. The new sort options are: Popularity, Recent, Subscribers, and A-Z. These new sorting options will make it easier than ever to find that perfect feed.

We wanted to make tagging supper accessible, so we came up with something we call Instant Inline Tagging. When browsing any feed list on the site, a new a ‘+ Add Tag’ button appears. Clicking the button instantly exposes an inline tagging interface. You have access to the same AutoSuggest functionality and you also can even see your other tags for the feed. This makes it super easy to go through and tag a large batch of feeds at once or add a tag to an interesting feed instantly.

So you tag every one of your feeds, and now you want to quickly see all of your feeds tagged ‘tech news’, what do you do? Well, we have built a brand new view that shows you all of your tags and how many feeds you have tagged that way. This new view makes it easy for you and others to understand what types of feeds you have, and also makes discovery even easier, now you can jump right into the feeds you know you will be interested in.

Last but not least, on every profile page there is a new section ‘Top Tags’, displaying the user’s 5 most used tags. ‘Top Tags’ makes it easy to understand what type of feeds a user reads at a glance. It is also a quick way to access all of the tags the user has tagged their feeds with by clicking ‘Top Tags’

Those are the major pieces of our tagging system, but there are many other details that we didn’t mention ( you can discover them when exploring). Toluu is all about helping you discover new and interesting feeds based on your interests. Tagging is a crucial piece to organizing the hundreds of thousands of feeds in Toluu. Tagging will make it easier to find new feeds, easier to find interesting new people to follow, and help bring order to your own feed lists Every tag makes the system smarter and more useful for everyone. Please tag your feeds and help tagging take off!

Quick Update

Caleb Elston — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 19:28:56 +0000

Things have been quiet on the blog as we have been heads down on some major new functionality. We continue to make small bug fixes and talk with all of you via email, Twitter and FriendFeed.

I can tell you that the new functionality has been our most requested feature and in testing it is pretty darn cool.

More details next week!

Squashing Bugs

Caleb Elston — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 16:14:56 +0000

As we mentioned last week, we have been focusing on the details of the site; making the experience of using Toluu better for both new and long time users. I wanted to share just a few of the items we have just fixed.

Twitter Ampersand Issue- When adding a feed whose title included an ampersand (&) posting to Twitter would go screwy, it would drop characters and the URL in the tweet. This has been fixed

Adding Self as Contact- Sometimes when trying to add someone as a contact the system would instead add you as a contact. This has been fixed.

Avatar Upload Error- Some users where getting errors or seeing blank profile images when they uploaded a new avatar. This has been fixed.

These are just a few of the items we have been fixing this week. Thank you to everyone who let us know about them and providing useful info about how and when they cropped up for you. Please continue to send in your feedback, we love hearing from you!

Details, Details, Details.

Caleb Elston — Thu, 24 Jul 2008 12:53:36 +0000

We have been fixing bugs and improving the matching system to degrade gracefully if you have no matches or we have not calculated your matches yet.

We know how annoying it can be when a site leaves you hanging, unsure of what has happened. We think the changes we have made will alleviate that anxiety.

Hopefully you won’t even see the new screens, but some of you will, and that is why we built them. We believe that building logic and screens that help you understand what is happening is super important.

We are going to continue to improve the details of the site for the next week or so, because details matter.

New Feature: No need to click, just hover

Caleb Elston — Wed, 16 Jul 2008 12:38:22 +0000

We have just rolled out a new feature that makes it easier to decide if a feed will be of interest to you. Now, when you hover over a feed anywhere on the site, a small tooltip will popup with the feed title and 5 recent posts from the feed. These post titles are clickable and link directly to the post on the source blog.

These new quick tool tips are available anywhere a feed appears on the site, the activity page, match page, feed lists, profiles, and the feed subscribers view.

We decided to build in this functionality when we found ourselves skipping by checking out a feed because we didn’t want to wait for the page to load or have to hit the back button. Since we weren’t always willing to take a risk on a feed to see if it might be cool, we thought you might be doing the same thing.

We think this new functionality will spark more exploration and discovery since you don’t even have to click through to the feeds to see if the feed is interesting. Simply hover.

Strengthening the Toluu system

Caleb Elston — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 19:07:32 +0000

We just pushed some improvements to the site. We have been working on strengthening our system; improving speed, improving security, and improving error handling.

The speed improvements we made to the matching system over the past few weeks have laid the groundwork to a more universal caching system. We have sped up the entire site while reducing the load on our system which will allow us to scale better.

In the security department we have implemented systems that prevent the hundred of thousands of feeds that we display from causing harm to our system. We are now guarded against 1,000’s of different types of HTML attacks. You shouldn’t notice any change at all, which is exactly the point.

Last but not least, we have made improvements to our error display and logging system. In the past, you might have experienced an error, but only been presented with a blank page. We have now built a custom error page and logging system that alert us the moment anytime an error occurs on the site. This means we will be able to fix bugs even faster and improve the experience of using Toluu.

New Match UI, 3 new filters, in-line contacts and more!

Caleb Elston — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 13:03:21 +0000

We have just launched a re-aligned ‘Match’ page with a cleaner UI and greater functionality. We have also made updates to ‘Contacts’ and feed ‘Subscribers’.

We recently made major changes to the architecture of matching to make it load dramatically faster. Today we have made design and functionality improvements. The new design is simpler and cleaner which should make it easier to hone in on the people and feeds that matter to you.

We have also introduced 3 filtering options. Now you can see your matches based on when they joined Toluu. Filtering by ‘This Month’ or ‘This Week’ shows only users who have joined in that period who match with you, surfacing fresh feeds and people. This makes matches more useful for users with many feeds or those who have been with us since the beginning.

Also new with ‘Matches’ is the ability to add a user as a contact in-line. Many of you asked for it and we listened. No more clicking through to a user’s profile to add them as a contact!

We also revamped the ‘Contacts’ view with the new UI conventions and in-line contact adding functionality. We also now show how many contacts you have.

Not to be left out, the feed ‘Subscribers’ view got some love too, it now has in-line contact functionality too.

We hope you find these improvements useful and they help you find more interesting people and feeds!