In case you are one of the temporarily affected users, no, your sources didn’t all conspire to publish nothing today.

We noticed some problems with the Recently Updated page for some users earlier today, where it wasn’t displaying articles and was showing “0” new items in some cases. We’ve been investigating and just as we were preparing a message for the site explaining it as an outage, we got word that the problem is in the process of being resolved. We’ll keep you posted.

Posted by dave coustan at 1:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

myEarthLink Reader experienced an unexpected downtime this afternoon, between and 4:20pm and 6:30pm EDT. We apologize for any inconvenience.

Reader is growing at a very nice clip, but that can mean occasional problems. And while Flickr, the community photo site, gets to have nice, relaxing massages, today Reader required a little tough love before it wanted to get back to work.

It's back now, happily delivering fresh content to your doorstep, like a faithful hound bringing the morning paper (but without the teeth marks).

Posted by Gregg Hartling at 7:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Last night we launched an update to myEarthLink Reader that fixes several issues we've heard about in the weeks since our launch. Bug fixes generally aren't as exciting as new feature announcements (don't worry, we'll have some of those coming soon), but there were some basic parts of the product we wanted to solidify. Here's a list:

1. Better UTF-8 Support - If you ever saw question marks or other strange characters in the title or text of an article, this is because we weren't properly handling UTF-8 encoded feeds. We've improved our support for this, but please let us know if you continue to see odd characters.
2. OPML import fixes - We received a few cases where people had difficulties importing their sources from other news readers. We've made a number of improvements that should make this process smoother.
3. Adding feeds when not signed in - This was fixed in a previous release, but I think it's worth mentioning, especially if you use the Add to myReader browser toolbar button.
4. Fine-tuning of Recently Updated - We've been refining how we display what's Recently Updated, and for how long, on a continual basis since our initial launch. We think this release is tuned quite nicely.

Sneak Peek: Related to #4 above, one of our upcoming releases will include a way for you to easily manage the volume of new articles you see when you've been away from myEarthLink Reader for a while. (But everyone's using it every day, right?)

Posted by Gregg Hartling at 6:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)