PostRank

A week ago we had a pretty big day. The reaction to PostRank and the new Google Reader extension was fantastic. Thank you!

In one week we’ve served up 5 million PostRanks! (We’re coming after your numbers, Golden Arches…)
Of course, when lots of people start poking at your stuff, quirks and bugs will be found. We do the best we can before we launch, but hey, there are a lot more of you than there are of us. (We appreciate your impressive powers of observation.)

And so this week we’ve fixed a bunch of things and added functionality directly resulting from user requests.

The highlights:

• PostRank on/off toggle: Some folks have reported that having PostRank running is slowing down their Google Reader experience. While we work on figuring out why that is (the latest version should actually make things faster), if, for some unfathomable reason, you’d like to temporarily turn off PostRank, you can do it in one click (checked is on, unchecked is off). The toggle is located in the left Google Reader pane, right above Add Subscription.

• Itemings remaining with unread appearance after being selected/read: Intermittently reported issue that should be fine and dandy and fading the appearance of read items now.
• Pressing Ctrl and clicking on an item opens a new tab and forces focus shift to it: Yeah, I hate that, too. It doesn’t happen anymore. New tabs open in the background and you can click on over to them at your leisure.
• Duplicate stories in a feed cause the analysis to hang: This one doesn’t happen often, but it’s just one of those little quirks that can be annoying. Anyway, no more eternal spinner, just sweet, juicy PostRanks.

In one additional note, it was brought to our attention that there was an intermittent problem with the J and K shortcut keys in Google Reader ceasing to function. We’ve looked at the code, and we don’t touch that functionality anywhere, so we suspect it’s something to do with the Greasemonkey compiler. (Unfortunately, we don’t control that…)

If you’ve been seeing this issue and don’t currently use Greasemonkey, we recommend installing it and then trying our Google Reader extension for Greasemonkey and seeing if that helps. Give us a holler if you’ve been seeing it, too. You can either leave a comment in the Get Satisfaction queue that mentions it or drop me an email: melanie@aiderss.com.

We hinted before… and now we have a fantastic new partnership to announce — NCS and AideRSS have teamed up to bring you FetchIt 1.2.

NSC and AideRSS Deliver Innovative Mobile News Solution

What more could you want? And it’s free to download!

We’ve seen lots of people commenting on how their mobile devices make commutes and waits far more interesting. Now you can Read What Matters and enjoy all your favourite media wherever, whenever. Rock on.

To quote the fine FetchIt folks:

The incredible performance of FetchIt, combined with its easy-to-read user interface and super-threaded design, lets users download RSS feeds, listen to podcasts, view weather forecasts and read news all at the same time.

Many thanks to Jeff and the NSC crew for all their hard work and being fantastic partners. We look forward to doing ever cooler things together in the future.

The latest PostRank API library was released to beta yesterday by Dan Sinclair for Ruby. He’s looking for feedback so if you can please grab the gem from github and give it a whirl.

I’ve created a Ruby wrapper around the API that people will hopefully find useful. I’ve currently tagged it as a 0.5 beta release until I can get some feedback on if the API is right for other people as well. (Plus, I know I want to change the Exception handling at some point so there will be changes before a 1.0.)

You can grab the postrank-0.5.gem or install it through the GitHub gem server by entering:

gem sources -a http://gems.github.com
sudo gem install dj2-postrank

Or, if you want to can grab the code from GitHub and build it yourself.

If you find any problems, have any suggestions or patches, you can file them on the LightHouse project page.

Another well done library for PostRank API - w00t!

Our partner NewsGator has made their excellent NewsGator Online reader even better with the addition of AideRSS’ new PostRank functionality, including Thematic PostRank™.

NewsGator Online Adds Enhanced AideRSS Features

As Jeff Nolan, VP of NewsGator Widget & Data Services, explains, “Thematic Ranking in PostRank gives users a more focused and personalized experience. Grouping and ranking posts based on themes of interest allows the kind of customization that takes RSS reading to a new level.”

Thanks to Ash Christopher for the latest client library for the PostRank API in Python!

What is PostRank Python API and what does it do?

This is an api accessor for python that allows a developer to quickly access all of the services offered by PostRank. It is loosely modeled after Mike Verdone’s Python Twitter Tools in that it is simple to use, and it uses the same arguments as those documented on the PostRank API page.

This is a nice addition to the growing list of community provided PostRank API libraries.

Thanks Ash!