Sunday, August 10, 2008

Back from My Vacation

It's been quiet around here lately. The reason is that I've been on a 3-week long vacation in Sweden, visiting family and friends. I am back home now, and eager to get started working on FeedJournal again.

I'm grateful for all votes, comments and suggestion that have been streaming in to the UserVoice page I set up before my vacation. A lot of people want to get their new issues automatically by e-mail. I'm sitting on the fence on that one, because it will put a lot more strain on the web server and I will risk winding up with a lot of wasted bandwith if people sign up with temporary e-mail addresses and then just forget about the service (which I do myself, all the time). The current architecture for FeedJournal Reader also make good use of the client browser for fetching feeds; logic that would need to be moved to the server. On the other hand, FeedJournal Publisher already implements all the feed handling server-side so it's not that I would need to reinvent the wheel here. I see the benefit of e-mailed issues for Kindle users especially, but I need to spend some more time thinking through the solution.

This week I plan to improve the handling of unavailable feeds in FeedJournal Publisher. Today, as soon as a request to a feed URL is not responding, I simply abort the generation because I considered an incomplete issue to be undesirable. However, this approach has disturbed some of the gold members, and I am now going to keep generating the issue while reporting unavailable feeds in the return message.

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