September Updates

A variety of updates were posted today that include mostly bug fixes and clean-up of some experiences. One notable clean-up is that category unread counts are now updated when an item is marked read or unread. Another is that after a page hasn't been touched in over an hour the next action will not cause a page reload. Instead it will keep all current data in please and re-fetch the next page.

As always, please let us know if you find any issues.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Support for keyboard shortcuts has finally arrived. Pressing the ? key will display a window with the list of supported keys. Shift isn't needed when selecting the ? key.

Faster Page Turning

A big update went live recently that revamps the process of navigating between pages. It builds on the changes from a month-and-a-half ago that did a better job of reducing page load time from the server, but this one reduces the amount of time spent on the client side. This can be particularly impactful on slower devices like phones where a page turn can now take a quarter of what it used to.

OPML Improvements

Some improvements have been made over the past two days in how OPML is handled. Importing will now correctly account for categories and exporting will now list categories.

As always, please let us know if you see any issues.

Restoring Opera Mini Functionality and Other Bug Fixes

It was pointed out that Opera Mini was broken with the last update. It was due to a couple items: 1) jQuery 2 which removes some legacy support that was apparently needed by Opera Mini; and 2) sessionStorage use without always checking for support. The former was fixed by going back to the latest 1.x series and the latter by making sure there was a fallback everywhere sessionStorage was being used.

Site Update

A major site update was posted today, and while you may not notice the change immediately, there are a number of impactful changes.

The first is removing support for Google Reader since it no longer exists, but that's mostly about syncing and importing feeds since feed fetching and parsing has always been handled separately.

It's easy to subscribe to feeds

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.

Importing from Google Reader

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.

Better Menus, Windows 8, and Bug Fixes

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.

4 Months of Updates

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.

Syndicate content

Navigation

j/k selects the next/previous item in the list
n/p in title view, selects the next item without opening it
space/shift+space moves to the next/previous page
shift+m open/close the main menu
shift+o open/close the options menu
enter select the highlight entry from a menu

Actions

enter,o in title view, expands or collapses the selected item
shift+a marks all items in the current page as read
d go to the item's list of similar stories
i/u designate the item as interesting/not interesting
m marks the item as read or unread
s adds or removes a star from the selected item
shift+s open/close the item's share menu
shift+u marks all items in the current page as unread
v opens the original source for the item in a new tab

Go To a New Page

g then h go to the homepage
g then i go to the Interesting items view
g then a go to the All items view
g then s go to the Saved items view
g then p go to the Popular items view
g then f go to the Select a Feed page

Application

- decrease the font size
= increase the font size
esc close any menu if open, otherwise deselect all items
? open/close a decription of keyboard shortcuts