myFeedz Development Blog

Whenever you click on a tag, you’ll see a page showing in its main content area articles related to that tag. To the right of the tag name are the filtering options:

Articles from: all feeds / my feeds only
Sort by: relevance / date

What do these filters do ?

1. Articles from: choose to either get the articles from all the system feeds or only from the feeds you’re subscribed to.
2. Sort by: sort articles using our own relevance algorithm or by publication date.

The relevance algorithm uses our own secret sauce to decide what articles are more important than others. It’s based on many factors such as the feed importance, related articles, your tagcloud, your list of feeds and many more.

Is the anything else affected by these filters ?

Yes, it is. The right sidebar follows the same source filtering and personalization rules as the main view, but inverts the sorting option. So, while the main view shows top tag articles based on relevance, the alternate view shows top tag articles based on publication date and viceversa.

Yes, we have tags. Let’s start with a brief introduction.

We’ve based myFeedz around the concept of tags as the central navigation system in this site. We look at them and see a pretty good way of capturing someone’s interests or storing details about an article, and this blog post is to give you some insights on how to use them.

Where do tags come from?

Regarding articles, myFeedz automatically tags all incoming articles and they can also be tagged by users. When it comes to your profile, tags are never automatically added by myFeedz. You only get suggestions based on the type of articles you read and feeds you subscribe to.

Finally, Personalize: Tags

This page helps you manage your tags. On the left side you see the tags you already added while on the right, the ones myFeedz thinks you might want to add in the “Suggested tags” section. You can also pick from the “System tags” which shows the tags everyone uses.

As you hover over the tags in the administration interface, you might notice a small red cross popping up. Clicking on this small icon will delete the tag. If you never want to see that tag again, you’d want to also add it to the “Ignored tags” list.

The old homepage was way too useless and wasn’t helping anyone so, after a few iterations and experiments, which were for a short while available to some of you (thanks for not letting us use the dumb ones), we decided to change it into what you can see now after you login.

We wanted to show a few articles from your most important tags so it could be a big timesaver if you were in a hurry and just wanted to get a quick overview of current news.

Right now, the main area shows your five most important tags and some articles from them and the sidebar shows some of your less important tags.

We feel this is a big improvement over the previous version and we’d like to know if you like it or not. Either way, post a comment, we welcome both praise and criticism :).

Before we start, we want to thank our beta users. Since we started the private beta process we received alot of valuable feedback from you. We greatly appreciate all the ideas and comments we received, keep them coming :).

So, we decided to start this blog to make it easier for people to get updates on what new features we are adding (or removing) and also to make it easier for us to find out how you use myFeedz and how we can improve.

The happy-hard-working myFeedz beta team.