Shyftr Blog

Over the past few weeks we've been trying to stay on top of the site performance. Having the site run and perform at a high level is something that we will relentlessly work towards achieving. The nature of the service will force us to continue analyzing how we handle our data. With that in mind, we are going to make some fundamental changes that may or may not affect your Shyftr usage.

The first measure we will implement will be to track numbers only dating back one month. If you are a daily or even occassional user, this most likely will not affect you. A month is a long time when it comes to near realtime access to information. If you don't use your account for more than a month, this does not mean that you will not have any numbers. It just means that your numbers will only date back a months worth of content per feed. When this implementation takes place it will take a few hours for the system to cycle through, and the new number tracking will be a permanent implementation - not a one time sweep.

It's important for us to do this because there is a database that is growing at such a rapid pace, effectively dragging down the performance and experience for everyone. We initially thought it would be nice for people to have the ability to go back and look through old content, but it's becoming clear that this is not important to users. Shyftr is being used as a near realtime content discovery and sharing tool, and we cannot sacrifice the performance of the site for a growing database that is rarely being tapped. Once we rollout the new way of handling numbers, we will remove a substantial portion of backdated data. This should alleviate much of the poor performance that we have been experiencing over the past few weeks, and possibly allow us to re-implement features that have been temporarily disabled (such as search). At the same time there may be some new features that come out of this. In the end, we will continue to evolve and enhance the user experience. It's time we trim some fat while making the system leaner, more efficient, and better prepared for future growth.

As we head down this path, we are looking forward to hearing any and all feedback you may have for us.

Over the weekend we made an adjustment to how we handle feeds and this caused a duplication of items that were already in the system. As a result, numbers were appearing for items that you may have already read. We sincerely apologize for this and hope it does not cause too much of an inconvenience. If you would like to quickly resolve what occurred, mark all your feeds as read and they will start tracking normally again.

Thanks to Caleb and the Toluu team for integrating Shyftr to the list of feed readers at Toluu. If you have a Toluu account and would like to add a feed to your Shyftr feed list, you can now sync them up. Check out all the details over at Toluu:

www.toluu.com/blog

You can now import an OPML file or export your Shyftr feed list as an OPML file.

To access OPML, select the green plus button at the top of your feed list and choose the OPML tab. To import, select Choose File or Browse... and browse your computer for your OPML file. Once you have chosen your file, select the Upload button to start the process. To export your feed list, select the Export OPML link in the OMPL tab, and then save the file.

Please be patient if you are importing a large feed list as it will take a few minutes. The good news is, you will see your feed list build during the upload process. Do not refresh the page during upload. This will stop the file from uploading.

Adding Feeds:

You can now add feeds without knowing the RSS or Atom feed URL. Here's how it works. For example, let's say I want to add the New York Times home page. All I have to do is type www.nytimes.com into the Add Feed form on my Feeds list (click the green plus sign and you'll see this form). You can also copy and paste the URL into the form. Looking for an even easier way? If you bookmark the Shyft It button, you can click Shyft It while on the New York Times home page. What if you want to add just the New York Times technology section? While on the New York Times site, click their 'Technology' link, then follow either set of directions above: copy and paste that URL into the Shyftr Add Feed form, or just click your Shyft It button.

Media:

Media such as video and audio can now be viewed inline in the reader, or through a popup window.

Search:

We've had to temporarily disable search for Feeds, Content, and Authors. You can still search for Members within the community. We will be working on improving our search tool so that we can bring these categories back as soon as possible.

Have a great weekend!