Alex and Scott have pushed out a new version release for FeedLounge, and … they named it after … me.

Wow. Just when I thought my night wasn’t going to get any better after watching my beloved Chargers defeat our hated rival … it did.

Has anyone seen my jaw?

Let me point all FeedLounge users, lovers, and haters to this: Alex King’s del.icio.us log of FeedLounge mentions. When Alex first announced that he was doing this, I was curious to see where it would go: I’m telling you now that I’m very happy with it.

Let’s examine some reasonable motivations for doing this:

1. Finding FL praise. This has got to help you at 2245 when you know you’ve still got bugs to quash and energy to do it. I get the feeling that Alex and Scott do what they do because they love it even more than they love getting paid for it; knowing that people love the products of their work has to stoke their fires to do an even better job. [Pause for a moment and consider being married to either of these two. What wonderful women they must be to put up with their husband's slavish devotions to their creative work.]
2. Finding FL criticism and bugs. Constructive criticism is good, and sometimes, it comes with bug reports. Sometimes, it’s design criticism that maybe they should address [and sometimes I address it for them if I know the answer]. Not everyone wants to file bug reports on a forum, either [although you can see on the update log that they quash bugs ruthlessly and also log it publicly, which I also think is awesome]. What I really love is that neither one of them seems eager or willing to jump on the hand grenades of the critics, and that FL lovers like me aren’t doing so, either. That said, linking to them is good—you want to present a full face of your product, and doing that means that you want to highlight the faults [even if people are misinformed or wrong].
3. Increasing the ambient findability of FL users. I think that FL users are, in some way, looking for a community; with a willful choice of using PunBB, I don’t think Alex and Scott want a community to develop in their forums—and being focused is fine and great, and I support that!—but I think FL afficianados can use this to slowly find each other, much in the same way that Mac users do.

I wasn’t sure that I’d be all gushy about Alex’s log at first, but I really am enjoying it a lot. Thanks, buddy.

Scott and Alex have released the FeedLounge to the public beta!

The FeedLounge guys have revealed their pricing levels: $5/mo. for a monthly subscription, or $49.95/yr. I promised Alex and Scott that I would complain about $##.95 pricing when we discussed this back a few weeks ago—I actually brought pricing up in some of our email traffic on this, because I was suggesting slightly higher rates—and so I must now register my complaint—I think $##.95 pricing is silly. We know it’s $50/yr. Just call it that.
That said, I find the service to be very much worth that pricing level. I’d probably pay more to them, but then I’ve been using FL for months and am about as irrational about it as your average junkie is about his heroin. I wish I were kidding, but I’m not.

Anyhow, just a reminder: FL goes from alpha to beta in a week!

Um, holy shit. I get new items without refreshing FeedLounge. Rock on!

I must now construct my shrine to Scott Sanders.

“My FeedLounge (1259 unread items)”.

Oi. This is what happens when I leave it alone for four days…

Alex and Scott have given us a nice entry on The State of FeedLounge, but what everyone really wants to know is the public beta date. That date is Monday, January 16, 2006. Mark your calendars!

Jeff Jarvis is angsty, and he wants to know how many people subscribe to his feeds via some of the hosted aggregation services [FeedLounge, Bloglines, Google Reader, etc.]. In his rant, he points to an entry about sending forward the number of subscribers as metadata in the HTTP user agent. Seems like a good idea to me … what about it, Alex and Scott?

The FeedLounge guys have moved over to PostgreSQL, and from talking to them while they were contemplating everything, this is a great move. Folks have probably been wondering what the bottlenecks in FeedLounge development have been, and I’m here to tell you that this has been one of them.

I bet Alex is happy that he’d gotten all that PostgreSQL experience in porting Tasks and TasksProâ„¢ over to it …

The FeedLounge guys released alpha 5, which felt fast to me at home yesterday. It’s positively snappy, though, here on my work machine, which is fast enough to see actual results. Given the speed improvements and the increased metadata mined out of the feed information … I’m very happy with the changes.
Oh, and autodiscovery’s finally supported. [I know why it wasn't, but man ... phew. This makes my life easier.]

I am now officially Alex’s bitch: not only do I personally use Tasks and FeedLounge, but I have a TasksPro install for [rocksmyfaceoff.net] and, as of yesterday, a UseTasks install for the UAH SGA House Rules Committee.

All this because of WordPress. WordPress is the marijuana of the personal productivity software marketplace.

Much of what Alex Bosworth wants in an aggregator, FeedLounge either already does, is planning on releasing soon, or could conceivably do in a future release.

[Please note that I am not an official part of the FL team, and any conceivable points I make on this score should not be considered to be official FL code direction.]

Okay, well, orange.

FeedLounge is back. Yay!

I don’t think that I can stress enough that hardware alone isn’t the solution. I field lots of questions as a user from Scott and Alex, asking me about performance, because they’re working to refactor code. They want to have the code be better than the hardware it’s running on, and that’s a worthy and achievable goal.

If you’re an alpha user, please give as much performance-related feedback as you can, now that the system’s running on hardware that doesn’t suck dead bunnies through a bent straw.

Due to time constraints, a little FL downtime, and the insane rate at which I get new items, I’m just now getting under 500 unread items from my high of 2800.

I might get to all read by the end of the day, if I do nothing else …

Gee, I think I’ve been out of town for a while. Great googly moogly … that’s a lot of marking as read. Thankfully, FeedLounge makes it really easy to do this … and I’ll definitely mark “Rainy Day” as read first thing.