RSS was in the news a lot this week thanks to Google's announcement that Reader is shutting down and it's prompted some discussion of Twitter vs. RSS. One knock on RSS is it's hard to subscribe to feeds. While browsers have made it more difficult to know if a feed exists Feedsanywhere makes it easy via a bookmarklet. Here's the text from one of our FAQs.

Q: How can I subscribe to feeds directly from any browser?

A: With the FeedsAnywhere bookmarklet you can subscribe to the news feed of many web sites with a single click. Right click on +FeedsAnywhere and select "Bookmark This Link", "Add To Favorites", or the equivalent for your web browser. I place the bookmark in my bookmark/links toolbar. From now on click on the bookmark to subscribe to the news feed for the current page. You must be logged into FeedsAnywhere for this to work.

You can also use the bookmarklet while viewing an RSS/Atom feed in your browser.

With this week's surprise announcement about Google Reader closing down at the beginning of July, it marks a good time to point out the easy way to switch from Reader to FeedsAnywhere.

1. Create a FeedsAnywhere account
2. Go to the Settings page
3. Check Google Reader Syncronization
4. Submit

You'll be asked to authorize access and FeedsAnywhere will start syncing your feeds. The process is simply and since it uses OAuth you won't even need to provide a username and password.

It's time for a roll-out of all the latest updates we have been working one. Many may not be immediately apparent depending upon the time of device or browser size you are using. On small screens the most noticeable change is an improvement to the menus to make them scrollable when they don't fit on the page. This should make them much more usable.

Another key update is better support for IE10 and an optimized tile icon for Windows 8.

It's been exactly 4 months since the last major updates went live and, as you can probably imagine, there are quite a few. I won't go through every little bug fix, but I will highlight what you can expect to see changed.

First off is the icons and each item's footer. Many of the basic text links have been replaced with an icon that is both easy to use with a mouse and a touchscreen. In fact one of the biggest drivers for this was high DPI screens. When a browser reports a high pixel ratio the icons will all be scaled as well making them easier to see and select.

We apologize for any difficulties you had accessing the site yesterday. A server update ended up taking much longer than expected and, unfortunately, erased some data that necessitated going to the most recent back-up. So if you marked some items read, saved them, etc., and aren't seeing that reflected you know why.

Everything should be getting caught back up today, however we have a lingering with scoring items and grouping so if you use the Interesting view you won't have anything new there yet. We'll get that fixed ASAP.

Thanks for your patience.

We apologize if you tried accessing FeedsAnywhere earlier today and couldn't get through. Our server when down due to excessive load and it took a while to get running again. We made some configuration changes that should help avoid some of the problems we ran into.

In regular news, some bug fixes and other minor tweaks have been uploaded too.

There are a lot of changes in this update, starting with a front page redesign to streamline it a bit and make the Feature Tour and Test Drive links more usable. We also added a login box directly to the front page to save an extra click, and while we were at it added Facebook Connect support so you can either login or create a new account using your Facebook credentials.

I just rolled out a large list of changes that include performance and touch optimizations and bug fixes. Most of them are subtle touches like adding consistency to some color changes and tweaking behaviors so they are a little more appropriate for both touch and mouse interaction.

A few that you may be more interested in are:

- Touch gestures now work on Opera Mobile on Android, and on every other Android browser I've tested. The exception is changing the font size by pinching. I've only been able to get that working on the iPhone.

A new menu has been created to make navigation easier from the top of the page. Clicking the feed name will drop down a menu with entries like those at the bottom of the page. The existing settings menu that is accesses through the wrench icon has been widened.

All of the drop down menus will increase in size for iOS, Android, BlackBerry, and Windows Phone devices to make them more accessible by touch.

Today's update features some exciting new capabilities. For the first time FeedsAnywhere supports some touch screen gestures that will, hopefully, improve your mobile reading experience. If, for some reason, the presence of gestures is causing you problems there is a disable switch in the settings. I also added disable for favicons.

Supported Gestures

- Swipe left to expand or collapse the item while in Title View. This is especially useful when reading a long item that you want to get past because you won't have to scroll to the bottom before closing it.