myFeedz Development Blog

Did we mentioned the myFeedz API? Oh, right, we did! Well, there are some neat examples on how to use the API in your blogs, but we thought we should offer you some real-life cases.

Remus recently exported his myFeedz profile on his blog. So now, you’ll know what he’s reading about (apparently, he’s pretty keen on AJAX, JavaScript programming, security and other technical topics). Not only that, but clicking on any of the tags from his profile will bring up a myFeedz page with fresh articles about that topic. (of course, you need to have a myFeedz account).

Beneath Remus’ tag cloud, you will also notice a list of popular articles for his profile, also exported via the myFeedz API. If you’re curious, he’s using the b2evolution blogging engine for his site.

Adrian has also done some cool integration work on his blog (most of the posts are in Romanian, but don’t let that fool you). He’s using the myFeedz API to automatically tag his blog posts. The screenshot below show the tags for his latest post:

Adrian has also imported the most popular articles for his myFeedz profile into his blog. He’s using Nucleus CMS as a blogging engine. This can be a cool way to let your friends know what stories interest you.

So what are you waiting for? It’s time to tune your blog with cool myFeedz nuggets that say everything about you. If you’ve done some API integration, drop us a comment. If you need any help, we’ll be happy to assist you.

myFeedz Team

With today’s update, we declare the first version of the API fully implemented. The new features allow you to issue two new query types: claimed feeds and saved articles.

Claimed feeds

This feature allows you to track your writing habits, which can spread over a number of different web sites. To take advantage of it, you need to add to your profile all the feeds you contribute to, then “claim” them by checking the green flag to their right, on the feeds page.

Note that the claiming process doesn’t force you to actually prove you’re the author, as there aren’t any bonus points for contributing to more feeds :). This is merely a way to differentiate the feeds you contribute to from those you just read, as you can later query them through the API. Example uses:

• if you run a blog network, you can combine all feeds and display a list of articles from all blogs onto your pages;
• if you contribute to a number of different blogs, you can get a tag cloud of your posts from all sites, tracking everything you write about.

Saved articles

One of the nice features of myFeedz is the ability to save articles for later reading, like newspaper clippings. We’ve also made it possible to get the list of saved articles through the API. You can use this as a “currently reading” feature on your weblog.

See the filtering and sorting section from the API docs for exact implementation details.

Performance improvements

Together with the bigger updates to the API, we also worked pretty hard to speed up the site for faster load times — especially the homepage should load visibly faster now.

In the last month or so we focused all of our efforts on implementing an API that helps myFeedz users pull content from our database of articles into their own websites. As the docs say:

Its primary audience is made up of power bloggers and other technology enthusiasts that can use it as a tool to track down information and trends in the news. A couple of use cases that we thought of are:

• automatic tagger for your blog posts;
• keep track of your reading interests with a tag cloud of your profile;
• display a tag cloud for your blog or blogs (thus tracking your writing interests);
• display content related to your posts — find out who is writing about the same things that you do;
• display articles from a certain topic and perform custom searches.

In order to use the myFeedz API you have to sign-up for a free account and you will receive an API key, required by all the calls made to the API. You can find your API key under the profile page of your account.

Feel free to use it for whatever you have in mind, as the API arguments allow for pretty creative queries, like the ones you can find in the examples section of the docs. All the examples there, as well as the two badges in the sidebar of this blog (Hot Topics and Top Articles) use the actual API, so you can get a pretty good idea about how the output looks like.

Usability improvements

In this update, we also rolled in a pretty useful feature to the signup and manage OPML pages. If you have an account with another online RSS reader—we currently support Bloglines, Google Reader, Rojo, NewsGator Online and myEarthLinkReader—, a small wizard will assist you in importing your current subscriptions into myFeedz, so that we can provide you with a custom profile based on your interests, all in a much easier process.

Happy coding!

myFeedz public beta is here and we are ready to accept more registrations. So, if you have been happily using myFeedz for the duration of the private beta, send your friends over to the myfeedz homepage and we’ll hook them up with an account.

Over the last couple of months we have been improving our secret sauce and we also added a ton of features like:

• complex tag queries
• feeds for everything that looks like a list
• a homepage that actually gives out useful articles
• usability and layout fixes

Searches

One of the most important things we added is complex tag searches. These are queries for multiple tags that you can save in your tagcloud for fast access. So, let’s say you want to get news about apple, but don’t really care about ipods (crazy, huh?). You just search for apple -ipod and then click “add to my saved searches”. Of course, saved searches (like all the lists in myFeedz) also export RSS so you can use to keep an eye on things. Searches currently possible with our current implementation:

apple AND microsoft -zune

david AND "ruby on rails"

Currently, tags containing spaces must be placed between quotes in the search box.

We’ll detail more about the rest of the features over the next few days. Until then, play around, spread the word and let us know how you’re using myFeedz.

Relevance

We also improved the relevance algorithms a great deal, so we hopefully clean up most of the junk for you and let you see only the important stuff. Also, we viciously refactored the database content, so now we have way less duplicated data (mis-spelled tags, etc).

Currently, we get back pretty relevant results, and also do a good job at cleaning up duplicate posts. We also created a lot of tools to help us tweak the algorythms as the system is running, so as to increase elevance when the parameters change (number of active users, number of aggregated feeds).

Coming up

In the next weeks, we will keep a close eye on your feedback, during the public beta phase. We will also be concentrating on how we can integrate stuff that is already build in our system to existing weblogs, in the form of API integrations. Stay tuned!

Andrei, Beje, Cristi and Tase

First of all, welcome Adrian Tanase on the myFeedz team! We know he’ll make a great addition with his superior ninja code-fu:).

On another note, we’re hard at work improving myFeedz performance. We won’t have the time to do everything that we thought of, but the first update coming on a couple of days WILL fix the most annoying speed issue with the website.

Rock on !

Because of the recent growth of myFeedz, we are starting to slow down our current server. This server is also running some other important things and we don’t want to cause any trouble.

We always knew that we’ll have to leave once we get too big and it seems that time has come. So, great news, we’re moving out :).

Our new server is ready and we’re busy testing and getting ready to switch. This upgrade will make everything faster and it will also allow us to accomodate more users as we expand the private beta and get ready for the public launch.

Unfortunately, this also means that we’ll have to take myFeedz offline for a while we migrate the data. We hope to keep the downtime to a minimum, please bear with us. The upgrade will happen in a few days.

We also want to thank you, our beta users. We couldn’t have gone this far without your help.

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.