Last week, in addition to a number of bug fixes and performance enhancements, we rolled out a small but fun update to myEarthLink Reader. Many websites provide a small icon for your browser to display when you visit. We thought that would be a handy way to provide subtle visual differentiation when reading articles from different sources.

To show some of the variation found across sources, here are a few different ones that offer icons (with links to add them directly to your Reader source list):

The New York Times maintains its brand identity with the blackletter 'T'. Add this source

Sports Illustrated gets into the act on its numerous categories. This one happens to track their NFL coverage. Add this source

Engadget is the place to find that cutting edge gift for the gadget lover in your life (or to keep up with all the latest if you are the gadget lover in your life). Add this source

Get all the latest basketball scores directly from NBA.com. Add this source

Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner breathe continued life into their popular book, Freakonomics, in their blog, which challenges conventional wisdom about everyday life from an economist's viewpoint. Add this source

This icon is actually from our friends at FeedBurner, who provide articles from O'Reilly Radar and hundreds of other sources (including our own Earthling blog). Add this source

The Sartorialist documents fashion on the streets of New York, and like many other sites, publishes through Google's Blogger weblog platform, which is the reason for the big orange "B". Add this source

When we can't find an icon for a given website, we borrow this generic icon from our sister site, myEarthLink Favorites. Blogging Stocks is a useful weblog from AOL Money & Finance. Add this source

Posted by Gregg Hartling at 8:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the things we on the myEarthLink Reader team really value is your feedback, and I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone who has clicked the feedback link at the top of Reader and shared their thoughts with us. We've received some great questions, suggestions and encouragement, and we take the time to personally respond to all emails that require a response — some of you like to just send in some commentary related to the articles you're reading, and hey, we like that too!

Some recent feedback has been extremely useful to us. Here's are a few of the issues, and how we're addressing them:

1. Deleting Saved Articles doesn't work: The problem here is that when you save an article and later try to remove it, you get an admittedly unhelpful error message saying, "Your article could not be removed at this time." Well, that's code for, "We have a bug." Our engineers have a fix that we'll be testing very soon, and hopefully launching late this week or early next week. For those of you who like to save articles, hold tight! (And sorry for the inconvenience).
2. Adding multiple Topix news sources is confusing: This was a good one. If you search for a keyword on the Add a Source page, we provide the ability to add Topix news search results to your page (e.g., "california" or "baseball"). The problem was that added sources would all have the same title Search - Topix.net. Not very descriptive. Well, our friends at Topix were kind enough to quickly change that, so now when you search, you'll get sources titled Search for "california" - Topix.net. This should make things much clearer. Thanks Topix!!
3. Categories: Categories (or folders, or labels) is a concept we've discussed for a long time on the Reader team, as a way of organizing your sources. We know we want to offer them, but want to make sure we do it in a way that maintains the application's simplicity. We're working on this feature for an upcoming release, so stay tuned.

If you have questions or feedback to share, please send it from our Feedback page. Thanks!

Posted by Gregg Hartling at 8:50 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)