Three Months to Scale NewsBlur | Hacker News Reader

Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

blog.newsblur.com

422 pointsconesus141 comments

And I just want to remind the technical crowd here that NewsBlur is 100% open-source: http://github.com/samuelclay

I've been asked quite a few times why I open-source the code. The answer is simple. Let me use an example from Joel Spolsky.

(From http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html)

    The dominant spreadsheet, with 100% market share, is Lotus 123. You're the
    product manager for Microsoft Excel. Ask yourself: what are the barriers to
    switching? What keeps users from becoming Excel customers tomorrow?

    ... <snip: barriers to entry> ...

    That's the barrier to entry. Not how hard it is to switch in: it's how hard it
    might be to switch out.

    And this reminded me of Excel's tipping point, which happened around the time of
    Excel 4.0. And the biggest reason was that Excel 4.0 was the first version of
    Excel that could write Lotus spreadsheets transparently.

    Yep, you heard me. Write. Not read. It turns out that what was stopping people
    from switching to Excel was that everybody else they worked with was still using
    Lotus 123. They didn't want a product that would create spreadsheets that nobody
    else could read: a classic Chicken and Egg problem. When you're the lone Excel
    fan in a company where everyone else is using 123, even if you love Excel, you
    can't switch until you can participate in the 123 ecology.

If you know that in the absolute worst case that you can still use the product even if it's shut down, then by golly, you have even less of a reason to not switch to it.

I tried to install NewsBlur, but instructions were not very helpful. I tried to get as far as I can, editing fabfile and installing gajillions of new python modules, but still failed.

Don't get me wrong, it is wonderful and very commendable of you to open source NewsBlur! Nor do I feel entitled to the source code or free ride (I will probably end up paying for the hosted solution). Just providing some feedback, given that you indicated that low barriers to entry are important to you.

I am not a web developer so that can partially explain my struggle with fabric, Django and multitude of webdev and devops modules that you use.

I wish you good luck and I hope that you take this wonderful product even further.

This is something I'll be working on soon enough. There are many, many dependencies (not only for the web app, but there are three DBs that you have to have installed as prerequisites - mongo, postgres/mysql, and redis).

The real problem with setting up your own instance of NewsBlur is that you'll have to do your own feed fetching. This is effectively what you're paying for when you pay for NewsBlur. Let me break it down.

500 feeds updated once every five minutes is 144,000 feed fetches a day. Couple that with the original page and icon fetches, you're looking at almost two feeds every second just to keep your feeds up to date. And the average feed takes 5 seconds to completely update (feed, page, differences in stories, updating unread counts). So you have to run 10 processes in parallel, and that's already beyond the capabilities of most single machines. Then good luck keeping your DBs running clean and backed up.

Or you could pay $2 / month and never have to worry about setting up a very big stack. And you get the social community of shared stories on newsblur.com.

Have you considered releasing VM images? I've thought about it for open source projects that have a bunch of dependencies, but haven't actually tried it.

On the other hand, you may end up with people running the app that have no way to maintain/support it.

Three DBs? I don't suppose you have a blog post or something that explains your architecture decisions? Not criticising - I'm sure you had good reasons - but I'm rather curious as to what they were :)

Based on the Github page, I would imagine Redis as a cache, MongoDB to store the 'non-relational data' (quoted from the GH page - I'm guessing the actual articles and such) and Postgres for the other application stuff - accounts, preferences, subs, etc.

https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/blob/master/apps/rss_...

It looks like MongoDB is being used for fetch/push history, feed icon data, and article data. It's also being used for some other stuff: https://github.com/search?l=Python&q=%22mongo.Document%2...

I too am interested, esp what goes into Mongo and what into Postgres (assuming Redis is a form of cache?)

I suppose I could also look at the source ;)

Just to add to this, the size of the data grows far more quickly then you would expect. I crawl 30 or so feeds for a personal project and database after 2 months of operation is over 200 meg in size.

For the cost of hosting/development/work you are MUCH better paying for newsblur and forgoing 6 outside coffee's a year.

> So you have to run 10 processes in parallel, and that's already beyond the capabilities of most single machines.

Er... really? My laptop is three years old and I run 150 threads on it every time I launch the server I'm working on (dozens of times a day). No problems at all.

It's in Java, in case it matters.

I believe he means that each process requires ~5 seconds of CPU/system time per update, meaning that even a single 8-core machine wouldn't keep up. It's not really related to how many threads or processes can be created, rather how many can actually be doing work in parallel.

There's an old saying that the true definition of supercomputing merely means moving the bottleneck from the CPU to the IO subsystem. The modern "big data" world seems about the same way. On a regular basis I find strange new ways at work to saturate any I/O system I get access to... Give me a faster I/O system, I'll find an exciting new way to bring it to its knees.

I tried very hard to setup my own instance as well going through the fabfile.py to figure out things, but I hit a point where I simply couldn't go ahead on my Debian Squeeze installation. I'd love to have a very good documentation on the installation process.

Also there seem to be a lot of stuff that need to be installed and configured that might not be necessary for single-user/<10 user instances. Yeah the 'fetching the feed part' still needs to be done, but I guess right now it is close to impossible for anyone apart from yourself to be able to understand how to do that.

Due to the mass exodus from Google Reader, I understand that NewsBlur has faced challenges in scaling and hence is slow. But things can only get better from here.

Since it in open source software, you should at least setup a getting started developer's guide so that you will get a lot more contributions from the community.

Does NB fetch feeds that have no new articles?

Doesn't it have to fetch feeds to determine there are no new articles?

Feed readers can send If-Modified-Since or If-None-Match as part of the request so the server only sends back the full feed if there's something new (Otherwise a 304 Not Modified)

Assuming that the feed implementer bothered... many news CMSs don't bother. The world of RSS is a horrorshow of standards noncompliance; Atom only somewhat better. (My experience is, admittedly,a couple of years out of date, but feed generation tends to be a minimum spend item for news organisations.)

Could you federate some of the feed fetches to your users? Get the UI to check for updates to some subset of that user's feeds and then ping the newsblur server to tell it when there's been an update.

You should make an intelligent feed updating algorithm.

If you have at least fifty previous entries from a feed it's easy to predict fairly accurately when that feed will need to be updated again.

That's how the indexer for http://rssident.com works. Saves you tons of cpu cycles.

Most blog providers support pubsubhubbub(the worst protocol name ever). It allows you to avoid polling, by having the content producer notify you of feed updates.

Except that, even with PSHB, you get polling. I wrote about it here http://www.dp.cx/blog/pubsubhubbub-and-polling.html#.UUcPWLp...

The fact that two feed clients, Superfeedr and Guzzle, implement PuSH wrong in no way leads to the conclusion that, when creating a feed reader, you can avoid polling for every content source that does support PuSH.

> I am not a web developer so that can partially explain my struggle with fabric, Django and multitude of webdev and devops modules that you use.

GitHub is not an app store. You can't expect to "install" a software as a service's code base. Open sourcing a project is opening it up to engineers, providing a self-hosted option on the other hand should be an easy to install alternative that probably requires another full-time engineer to handle as it needs to come with ability to upgrade, get logs, support and documents...

Seems like there's a need for a cloud infrastructure/language independent packaging format, to build a "github of installable applications"

Maybe container images that can also be used as bootable images?

> Seems like there's a need for a cloud infrastructure/language independent packaging format, to build a "github of installable applications"

I think Chef and Puppet try to fill that role, somewhat

Edit: actually, this recent HN discussion looks promising https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5392041

Something like JuJu?

> I tried to install NewsBlur, but instructions were not very helpful.

NewsBlur should distribute in an .egg form, or via PIP directly, with VirtualEnv and everything.

There is a difference between open sourcing a product and releasing it through multiple channels as binaries. I do not think the latter is in the best interest of the developer.

Just wanted to say, NewsBlur and Pinboard are both big inspirations for me. It's awesome to see people making money off of open source software.

pinboard isn't open source?

This analogy seems to be describing a different principle. Microsoft was trying to break the network effect that Lotus had.

I agree it's not a 1-to-1 analogy, but the idea is the same. Knowing you're free to come back to Lotus by using Excel frees you from the chicken-and-egg constraint of waiting until your entire office is on Excel. With NewsBlur you know that you can host your own instance if your dependency on the newsblur.com hosted instance breaks.

I see what you mean by that, but open-sourcing all your software instead of just having an export function seems risky to me.

In our area of business, our features get copied really quickly.

It might be risky, but there are a lot of other companies that are doing exactly the same thing and and have shown a great path for newsblur.... (for example, wordpress, sugar-crm, etc).

You can still copy the feature without looking at the code. Sometimes its even preferable.

An export function is hardly the same thing. We're not talking about the concern that an RSS client might go away. There's no shortage of clients. No-one worries too much about those. The concern is what happens when the service goes away.

This analogy only helps for developers that would be comfortable installing and operating their own instance. I don't see many folks being excited about the opportunity for personal use.

For other folks hoping to build their own service, commercially or otherwise, having access to your code provides a huge savings in time to market.

You would be better off by just copying features and writing your own code than taking NewsBlur's highly coupled code and trying to forge your own business out of it. I think they reserve that task for developers sent to hell.

Hello Samuel,

I'm sure you will need all the help you can get with upcoming traffic so I've tried contacting you recently about helping you scale better with https://errormator.com, but I somehow miss you when you are online on IRC, so I've sent you mail to the mailbox i've found.

Its great since your app is python based and we maintain an awesome python client.

Drop me a line if you are interested, we love open-source at Errormator so you would get a completly free plan for non-profits :-)

I could also help you personally if you have any integration questions, you can find me on #errormator on Freenode IRC server.

How does this compare to [1]?

[1]: https://github.com/errbit/errbit

Hey, you could use airbrake/errbit compatible client to stream errors to errormator by changing the endpoint, but it is 30% of what errormator provides (just exceptions), we aim to be a lot more than that.

Please see this inteview with us that was posted recently, the article is in polish but the screenshots should give you a better overview of what errormator can do:

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=pl&tl=en&js...

In short:

- exception monitoring

- performance metrics

- slow request and slow call aggregation

- log aggregation

We def. need a new index page and a features page to show all the functionality in a nice way.

Errormator launched its new index page yesterday - some things are still missing, but the images should give you a better overview of what to expect vs. other solutions.

Cheers!

I'd just like to point out that '$24/yr * high four-figures of paying costumers' with only one employee ensures NewsBlur will be around for a long time. :)

This is the kind of single founder "life style" startup that VC's would paw-paw that is Doing It Right that many of us aspire to. The other ones I can think of are Pinboard and Instapaper. I'd rather go this route, personally, here's to more like these. Cheers.

Indeed. If one were wise, you could stalk Google/Yahoo/BigCo properties that are being neglected, launch a paid competitor and reap the reward when they shut down.

Pinboard and now Newsblur.

Quick, someone make a search engine!

See https://duckduckgo.com/ :-)

Thats actually a really good idea.

I wonder what would be next? Most of Yahoo's properties seem be be neglected at the moment, but what about Google? Google News perhaps?

Probably Google Alerts. It's rather niche but people who use it absolutely rely on it. But the VC-funded Mention seems poised to take that one.

Google Alerts is a good candidate. Pardon anecdotal evidence, but the people in my circles who rely on it are executives who watch for their own names, or brand managers who watch for coverage of their company.

This information is very valuable and I'm sure a good service could charge a nice premium.

I've received some deliverables from a marketing team which uses the following service for just such a purpose (at a nice premium) @ https://www.meltwater.com/products/meltwater-news/online-med...

I have been using warble.co recently, which does alerts for twitter

flikr -> openphoto

but delicious is still around, it was never shutdown, and from what i can tell, is better (from a functionality perspective) and has a bigger community than pinboard. the site design of pinboard alone turns me off to it

It does make the truck number rather low. This is still probably less of a risk than trusting Google to keep a marginal product around (as recent events demonstrate), but there are different risks for small organizations that big ones don't share.

With currently only 3400 paying users it's only 80K pr. year of revenues (and the profits are probably much lower). It's still far from a good business and this kind of money does not have any kind of guarantees.

> "Since the announcement, NewsBlur has welcomed 5,000 new premium subscribers and 60,000 new users (from 50,000 users originally)".

That's at least $200,000/yr with high margins.

That math doesn't seem to work out. 5000 subscribers * 24 (dollars/year)/subscriber = $120,000/year.

5,000 new subscribers...

3400 is only the number of new paying users in the last 24 hours.

The amount of annual income from this product will now end with "million".

Oh, wow. I had not realized that number was the DAILY signups...

revenue, not income - he's going to have high server costs now and if he wants to keep this scaling up, i suspect he'll need to bring on another person soon. at the very least, a customer service rep.

still should easily net him a nice recurring six figure salary.

Currently adding over 4k paid users per day.

He reaches $1 million at just over 40k paid users.

Factor in the userbase he's already been building for 4 years, the hundreds of thousands of Google Readers currently leaving, the millions that will need to find a replacement before July, and the last-minute movers on July 1st.

I don't think server costs and a couple of employees will put him below a 7 figure income.

I agree, this is a great model. To shameless plug myself I plan on doing the same with Pinry: http://getpinry.com/

<blockquote>The inevitable file descriptor limits on Linux means that for every database connection you make, you use up one of the 1,024 file descriptors that are allocated to your process by default. Changing these limits is not only non-trivial, but they don’t tend to stick.</blockquote>

You're clearly a talented programmer, but perhaps employee #2 should be a sysadmin.

"Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity"

Congratulations.

This is why I love SaaS. 6 figures revenue in a couple of days, and I can only imagine how much more will be made in the next 3 months... and beyond.

But it's not a once-off payday. This is recurring. 7 figure annual income is yours, Sam. People slave away for decades trying to reach a tiny fraction of this amount. Put it to good use, brother.

"6 figures revenue in a couple of days"

Those couple of days took 4 years of preparation.

Yes. Which is why the first line of my comment literally reads "Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity".

That was surprisingly clueful of PayPal. Usually that part of the story is way more dramatic and ends up with alternate payment options.

Only in the stories. The majority of situations where PayPal calls probably end just like this. I've taken that call myself and didn't have a problem. The stories we read are almost all about people doing things they shouldn't with any payment processor; that's why it only gets worse when the processor learns the details.

Agreed, when the company I work for was just one guy, he had the same thing. They put a hold on funds (he had a lot of declined payments, nothing dodgy, just users not knowing how to use company credit cards), but as soon they'd checked all the paperwork they released it after a few weeks.

Hi, So i have noticed that you are very forthcoming with data, such as providing the number of premium users on your webpage, and I hope you continue this - I really hope you become more succesful with this Google Reader debacle going on.

1) Why are you open about the number of users ? (personally I think its great) 2) How do the real-time stats work, I notice that the amount of regular users was over 20k a few days ago, and now its 8k. Are these the users who have used the client/service in the past 24 hours ? (and not the actual total amount of users)

From another comment, those numbers appear to be the new signups in the last 24 hours - and as the free option became much harder to find recently, I would expect the number of free signups to decrease dramatically.

> and as the free option became much harder to find recently

That's only temporary though.

Will you be adding a Google Reader compatible API?

(So existing Google Reader apps can quickly switch to NewsBlur)

You can do this currently. My feeds were quickly ingested and everything worked great.

In case you wonder why you are getting downvoted: He is asking about a compatible API for 3rd party apps (Reeder, gReader and so on) to be able to connect to newsblur just by changing the API URL.

Ah ha, thanks :) Woke up this morning and was wondering why. Was a late night post.

A tad off topic, but I'm hoping the fastest way to get an answer: How does one move or delete multiple feeds at once in newsblur? There must be a way to do this, right? Say I import 100 feeds from an OPML file, then realize I actually want them all in a folder. At the moment the only way I can figure out how to do that is to click on each feed, click move to folder, click the folder dropdown box, click the folder I want, click save. Times 100. Or I can save one click each by deleting them all then re-importing. But there must be a faster way. (In Google Reader settings, one could filter all folders with a keyword pattern, and bulk move.)

Heh, wondered that myself yesterday after I realized my OPML contained old feeds for some reason. Reimporting feeds will delete your current feeds :)

Hmm.. that would be helpful. Unfortunately it looks like there are some bugs to iron out. Twice in a row now, I've created a folder, then in the folder menu got to add feeds to that folder, imported an opml file, and... the folder disappears and the feeds go into the root.

I had a nearly identical experience. I took it as a spring cleaning moment and deleted about 10 basically dead or no longer interesting feeds. So it took about 2 hours, but most of it was mental processing, reviewing recent posts (if any) and thinking about each feed for about a minute. UI improvements would be cool, but spring cleaning still would have burned about 2 hours anyway.

"I had been preparing for a black swan event like this for the last four years since I began NewsBlur."

And then the black swan event comes.

And then fire everywhere.

Same paragraph:

> I did not expect it to come this soon.

ironically, black swans, by their very nature, are in fact unpredictable (at least according to Nassim Tabeb) :)

I wonder what Samuel's attitude towards taking external financing is. Because NewsBlur is having a hell of a momentum on Google Reader news (pun not intended).

NewsBlur was funded as part of YCombinator Summer '12 http://blog.ycombinator.com/newsblur-yc-s12-takes-feed-readi... http://blog.newsblur.com/post/27033939756/introducing-blurbl...

Well now that he has a graph pointing up and to the right he can certainly raise money and collect developers as if they were Pokemon and play games with the valuation in the hopes that somebody Acquihires Newsblur or buys them for some opaque strategic reasons.

Maybe Google will buy them! :)

Edit: I kid, but that's actually a possibility in my mind and would be an ironic outcome. Maybe Facebook or Yahoo or somesuch will see the value of having the New Reader. Selfishly, I am hoping for something else.

IMO the best acquirer would be someone who wanted credibility among high-end technical users or journalists, not someone who wanted to turn it into a mass-market thing.

If I were Palantir, I'd probably drop $250k/yr to run the World's Best RSS Reader for the kind of research analysts who become Palantir customers, and the kind of geeks who make awesome Palantir employees. There are maybe a hundred companies you could substitute for Palantir here.

Seriously ironic that both of the likely Reader successors are YC funded (Feedly and Newsblur)

it would be better if Clay keeps it and doesn't sell it. read earlier comment regarding one employee and little overhead. kudos to open sourcing the project and being able to support it. i'm pitching in even if it doesn't become my new go-to rss reader.

I was in YC's Summer 2012 batch, so you be the judge. :-)

Sam, congrats!

For a task a parallelizable as fetching feeds, I can't recommend Picloud.com enough. You can ssh into a box, provision it however you want, save that image off, and then run arbitrary commands/scripts on instances of that image, on the CPU type you want, and pay only for the seconds of usage you have. (Their "s1" core type is $0.04/hour: http://www.picloud.com/pricing/ ) They also have a system that lets you mount the same shared "drive" from multiple instances at the same time, so if you're doing file-based stuff, it's easy.

The thing I like about it is that running another instance of your script on a new machine (or 2k of them) is trivial. No need to wait to provision a new VPS. Starting and stopping jobs is fast, so scaling up/down is fast.

(I'm swear I'm not affiliated with them. I'm using it for a side project at the moment and have been so excited about it, I want to spread the word.)

It must have been an intense mix of fear and excitement trying to fix anything and everything that broke, but NewsBlur deserves it IMO. It is a great product, and I think this post makes it clear that he cares about his users' experience.

I registered progrss.net a few years ago in the hope of creating a "smart" RSS reader that could help me (and others, possibly for a fee) save time by passing my feeds through easy to set up filters. The idea, sounded good, the mockups and and the prototypes looked good, it was fast and easy to use, the UX was distinctly different from all the others… but I grew tired of RSS as a whole and of woking on progrss.net. Now I don't use RSS anymore and my project was already pretty much stalled when NewsBlur was first announced here.

The day Google announced they retired Reader was "missed opportunity day", over here.

Anyway, good luck to you.

Do you have a API? I was building a news reader for iOS when !kaput! Google reader (I was in the middle of integrate it). Now I wonder what to do next. I love to support another "small" players like yours...

You bet I do: http://www.newsblur.com/api. I would love to hear about your ideas. I feature a number of third-party extensions and apps written against NewsBlur's API on the Goodies page.

Can I possibly buy a month or two at a time? I want to try it out without buying a whole year. I know that's cheap of me, but I'll probably be trying a few RSS readers in the near future.

Congratulations on being well-positioned and ready to handle the onslaught when Google announced that they were axing Reader. You clearly were "where the puck will be" :)

I tried out NewsBlur and sadly, Feedly seems leagues better.

Could you atleast describe what is better about Feedly, so not only the creator of NewsBlur, but also anyone looking to spend money on an RSS Solution gets your informed input?

I briefly tried both.

* Feedly has a simple interface which is much more like Google Reader. But it depends on a plugin (or an app) rather than being an allwhere accessible website. Their Kindle Fire app seemed to load content extremely slowly, and its interface wasn't a simple list. And it's free, so I can't be a customer and I don't know how they earn money.

* NewsBlur is complicated and unresponsive. There are a lot of inscrutable unlabeled icons, and I don't understand why an arrow follows the mouse. It's a paid service - I can be a customer - but I don't know how sustainable NewsBlur will be with its current issues and with subscription as its only source of funding.

If NewsBlur seems solid by May, I'll gladly pay them. If Feedly seems less like a faceless data-miner by May, I'll use them.

"and I don't understand why an arrow follows the mouse."

Really? It is a feature for better reading, so you can can easily see which line you are.

You mean so as to remember where you were last reading are on the page? But if you use the mouse to switch browser tabs, that arrow moves up to the top of the page, and if you use any of the controls at the bottom, it moves down. I guess one could very carefully leave the window at a specific place so as to preserve that arrow's position, but it's not an obvious thing to do. How are you using this feature that makes it an improvement over just letting your pointer itself mark the current reading position?

Make sense now that someone points it out! For those who mouse click to mark reading point.

Aha. It somehow hadn't occurred to me to click on that triangle. I'm still not sure it's a useful-to-me feature, but it at least makes a little more sense now. It's less annoying once locked down, anyway. Maybe it should default to being locked down somewhere and only unlock the first time you click on it, rather than default to floating around freely.

Try http://rssident.com

I am working on making the UI more user friendly and adding OPML import/export.

It's going to be supported by advertising with a subscription service for premium features and no ads.

I was attracted by the basic looking design, but I can't work out how to do anything. Why am I subscribed to a huge number of random feeds? How do I get rid of them? How do I view the content of the feed instead of opening a new window on the original site?

If you haven't added any feeds to your favorites then viewing 'My Favorites' shows all feeds by default.

Still working on the UI to show the article content and links to attached files.

I like the predictive aspect Personally, I'm looking for something with a GR atom API, possibly to even run the existing GR frontend against, not a new UI with a different focus (I would prefer one focusing on curation and workflow over social or sharing).

I love NewsBlur but I found it a bit busy in the UI. It seemed like a lot for what it really needed to do. That being said, Feedly's minimalistic UI was far better. However, Feedly is a bit slower when there are tons of stories on the screen.

Overall I found Feedly to be better.

I looked at Feedly and Newsblur last week as I look for my eventual Google Reader replacement.

Feedly turned me off because it has no open web implementation, it runs through the Chrome web store. Aside from some developer related plugins I refuse to use a completely superfluous wrapper around a website if I am on my PC.

I've tried Newsblur but it's just so "busy" (I know where my mouse is on the vertical axis thank you very much). I may warm to it, but I'll probably end up with something a little simpler. But I wish all the success in the world to conesus, a variety of small, customer focused, customer capitalized independent web service vendors is a good thing for all of us.

> Feedly turned me off because it has no open web implementation, it runs through the Chrome web store

Seriously, going to the feedly website, the first thing you're confronted with is a list of platform-specific apps you have to download, and "this website wants to install something, ok?"

There seems little reason for this with today's browsers, and it seems like a very good way to make a large proportion of potential users say "no thanks" before even trying it. I know it made me immediately toss feedly into the discard pile in my reader-replacement search...

You should lock that "dorito" that follows your mouse. It allows you to adjust the currently selected story. It's an indicator line. Maybe I should lock it by default and allow you to click on it to have it follow your mouse...

I wasn't aware you could do this. Locking it by default seems like it would make more sense.

Also while I've got you, two issues I've noticed.

1. When I click "All Stories" to refresh my feeds it defaults to listing everything, even though I have it set so I only view one item at a time. As soon as I click the button/arrow to go to the next unread item it shows the first item as it should and everything works fine after that.

2. I seem to run out of items after I've viewed ~20ish and I have to click "All Stories" again to fetch a new bunch

I'm using the dev site if that matters (Issues happen on both sites though). So far these are the only things annoying me and otherwise newsblur is pretty good.

1. Intentional. Otherwise you'd stare at a blank screen until you click a story.

2. That's an unfortunate bug, but one that will probably get sussed out when I work on scaling over the next month.

Dev is largely just a re-skin. They share a backend.

Why can't there be an option in the cast of 1. for it to automatically open the first unread story when I click "All stories"? Basically what I am doing by pressing the first unread button.

I can understand not doing that by default since people may want to see their unread feeds, but I always just go to the first unread one anyway.

In that case, there's a preference waiting for you that you're going to just love...

Haha, excellent, thank you for helping me. Also "Text" view seems to be missing from the Default View preferences, is this intentional?

up / down arrows to go to next story sucks too, fwiw.

Try http://rssident.com

The UI needs work but it is very simple.

Scalability will not be an issue. It was designed from the start to be scalable. Just add servers.

Got it the first time you posted on this story ;)

I tried both and NewsBlur seems leagues better. It guess it depends on what you want.

For me the interface of NewsBlur is so much better for getting through tons of feeds,

Waiting for the day that NewsBlur becomes so successful that they get acquired by Google.

Props on having an exciting validating road over the next few months!

Likewise, what are some of the engineering things you'd really like some of the more dev heavy users to maybe help via pull requests with? :)

(I see that the github issues list is relatively short)

Thanks for providing this service and having such great communication with users!

well done with keeping this app running! I switched from Reader as soon as I noticed, and I've been reading my feeds through NewsBlur the last couple of days with no problems (after an initial setup delay)!

I have a couple of comments on how the UI works, but I'll consider those as time goes by and send you more specific feedback then (mostly I'm annoyed by things that work differently to google reader, so I'll hang back and see if they convince me...)

So far I am not a user of ANY reader. Between googlenews, twitter, and HN I get my daily digest.

I would like to try Newsblur but it seems that to get immediate value I have to have been some reader user: I can migrate my googlereader account or upload an OPML file.

What I would like to see are different versions of OOTB "skins". I can sign up as an "HN-lover" and it seeds my account with 50 blogs I should follow. Then I can actually evaluate the product.

Also note that free accounts are not actually disabled. If you leave the session when you hit the paywall and login from the homepage, you now have a free account.

As I mentioned on Twitter, if you want a free account but can't get around the paywall, just know that the paywall is extremely leaky on porpoise...

> just know that the paywall is extremely leaky on porpoise...

This is my new favorite typo.

I don't think that's a typo.

In other words: does anyone with a reader setup they love want to share their OPML file so I can try out Newsblur?

Thanks!

here is a link to mine: https://www.dropbox.com/s/afksdrwxc1f0thq/subscriptions.xml

For anyone else not familiar, OOTB == out of the box.

Thank you urban dictionary...

If i understood the numbers correctly, newsblur has went from 1500 paying/50000 free users to 6500 paying/110000 free users?

I'm interested in your decision process in picking Reliable and then Digital Ocean.

Originally price, now price + API for deploying new instances. If you check out my fabfile.py script you'll see that I have EC2 setup and ready but I don't use it because it costs more, runs slower, and is a pain in the butt to maintain.

Oh, I meant vs. spending $20k on hardware, or partnering with someone like Softlayer/Rackspace as a promotional thing (I suspect either would be willing to give you a great deal to use as a marketing case)

My guess... DO offers hardware in 60 seconds. Also cheaper/faster than EC2.

I am guessing you're using DO VPS for very specific purposes. I have a VPS on it myself, but they do not provide any way for VPSes to network with each other, which is annoying for multi-host setups. If you have them communicating with each other, I'd appreciate it if you shared your approach.

And congrats on your increased traffic.

It's the one manual step I have to do. After I provision a server, I copy the IP and stick it in a few places (my fabfile, my hosts file that I then re-copy to every other machine, and my HAProxy config).

While I do provision new servers regularly, I don't auto-scale, so I don't have a need for pure automation. It would be nice, but that's something I look into when I learn about new deployment procedures.

I want to buy! Take my money! But your site errors out after CC deets. :(

Congrats! Enjoy the ride..

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