Yesterday we launched a new release that included the following changes:

• You'll now see 50 articles per page.
• We added an indicator, at the bottom of the page, of how many articles are left on subsequent pages.
• We added a timestamp under the "Recent Updates" category in the sidebar navigation menu. This should help provide some context to the term "Recent Updates".
• We removed the confirmation window when deleting sources from the Manage Sources page.
• We fixed a bug that didn't allow Internet Explorer users to delete sources.

An additional goal of this release was to improve performance--to speed up the application--but we aren't satisfied with the results of the changes. Expect to see more performance improvements before you see feature additions in product releases to come.

In the meantime, if you see bugs or minor tweaks that would make your experience with the product better let us know about it.

Happy feed reading!

Posted by Travis Metcalf at 6:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | 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)

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)