Rososo on Tumblr

Feed Reader Problems

Sun, 28 Nov 2010 11:25:38 -0500

There are some capacity problems with the feed reader occurring intermittently. I will be working to put a fix in, but you may witness some problems here and there. So sorry for the inconvenience.

Rososo Lives!

Fri, 19 Feb 2010 12:48:59 -0500

http://rososo.com

New Rososo I have spent the past few weeks completely reworking...

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 12:53:31 -0500

New Rososo

I have spent the past few weeks completely reworking the internals of Rososo. The new platform is more stable and robust, but most importantly easier for Kyle and I to program. This will ensure faster bug fixes and hopefully more new feature roll outs.

Rososo is still only released to the test subdomain, but I plan to push it out to rososo.com either today, or in the next couple of days. Stay tuned!

Sponsoring Rososo

So it had to happen. However, I hope to make them something that is more useful than annoying.

I am going to offer 2 ways for sponsors to market using Rososo. The first is through sponsored bookmarks. These will run for one month at a time and will show at the top of the feed list. They will always show for non-registered users, but will behave much like feed links for registered users - disappearing when they are clicked. Once clicked, they will not return for that sponsorship period.

The other sponsorship spot is a default bookmark for a new user. Newly signed up users will by default, get this bookmark added to their list, potentially becoming something they read on a daily basis.

I am currently building out an admin section for sponsors to view the activity of their sponsorship.

Please contact me for more information on this program.

Suggestions, Badge and OPML Import

I have turned these features off for now. They were poorly implemented in the past and I plan to rework and release them soon.

Happy interneting!

Rososo is back (almost)

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 14:18:00 -0500

So the feed crawler problems have been solved and I have put the site back up in a demo location for testing purposes. If you are reading this, feel free to try it out on

test.rososo.com

Since its ‘beta’, holding off reblogging / reposting elsewhere would be appreciated.

For those of you who know what it was, I have removed the badge blurb in the About section for now. It wasn’t used very heavily and I am trying to whittle rososo down to its bare minimum in an effort to ease the transition to a different code framework. When this transition is succuessfully made, I hope to start rolling out some new features.

Now added to the About section is a shameless grovel for Paypal donations. In addition to fronting the hosting costs, I have already and will continue to devote a fair amount of my personal time to maintaining and improving the site. Anything would be appreciated, but of course not expected.

Please let me know any problems you encounter or feedback you may wish to provide at hello@rososo.com.

I hope to be rolling it out to rososo.com very soon.

Thank you all for your patience and interest in Rososo. And thank you Kyle for all your help with the crawler rewrite.

Billy

Marco's feed is not nice to the crawler

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 12:07:00 -0500

The crawler is trying to conserve as much bandwidth as possible and Marco’s verbose description field is throwing this effort off…

It’s clear this is being dumped from the Tumblr ‘Description’ field, but It’s also got his google analytics tracking code buried within which seems superfluous. Just sayin’.

Debugging crawler, progress slow

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 11:12:24 -0500

I’ve managed to create an entirely new, lean crawler however testing it has proved tricky. I’m juggling this work with paying work so its unfortunately taking a back seat to that at the moment.

Road to Recovery

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 12:00:57 -0500

Happy New Decade all.

So sorry for the long downtime and associated, unacceptable radio silence on my part. We are turning over a new leaf here at Rososo and hope to be up and running soon.

A bit of background on the crash:

Rososo has a crawler that has to go check your feeds every X minutes to find out when they have last updated. To do this, the previous crawl method was relying on 3rd party tools to fetch the entire feed and parse for a date changed.

As Rososo grew, the number of feeds did as well and this old method was consuming TONS of bandwidth just to read out a single date.

This method has been entirely scrapped and a new feed reader is being written from scratch. It will be lean and mean and hopefully will allowed for continued growth of the feed base.

Stay tuned. I will try to keep a pulse here from now on.

Thank you for your continued interest in Rososo.

Billy

Cron Misbehaving, Updates Affected

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 10:44:00 -0500

I am currently trying to get to the bottom of a mysterious cron job problem (a cron job is the thing that runs automatically in the background to keep the feed updates current) .

Until I resolve it your feeds may update sporadically - I am sorry for the inconvenience.

Feed Crawler Enhancements

Sat, 17 Jan 2009 19:03:00 -0500

A major change to the feed crawler was just pushed out. Those of you who have written in to ask why some feeds were not being reported as updated should hopefully see many, if not all of them accurately displayed now.

The new crawler has 3 ways to try and get a feed and its latest update. Unfortunately there are some poorly formed feeds out there that do not contain a publish date and consequently cannot be crawled by Rososo.

Thanks to all of you for the reports, please continue to let me know if any feeds are not updating. I will do what I can to try and make them work.

New bookmark click behavior

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 17:06:00 -0500

The feedback I received indicated that I was not alone in wanting the bookmarks to open in a new window / tab so I have implemented this. Additionally, the bookmarks will now disappear from the list as you click them.

Open Bookmarks in New Window / Tab?

Sun, 11 Jan 2009 12:27:51 -0500

My usual work flow when reading my Rososo bookmarks is to open all of them in a new tab, then close the tabs as I read through them. I do this on my computer by using ctrl/cmd + click, but this is not possible on the iPhone.

I find it annoying to have to navigate back to rososo.com after I chase down a link trail. Because of this, I am considering making the bookmarks automatically open in a new window / tab. If anyone has any comments on this please let me know.

hello@rososo.com

With a small snippet of Javascript, you can now put an...

Wed, 03 Dec 2008 01:02:00 -0500

With a small snippet of Javascript, you can now put an “Add to Rososo” badge on your site / page containing an R.S.S. Feed. Check the “About Rososo” tab on rososo.com for more information.

Rososo is back on line

Mon, 24 Nov 2008 23:42:00 -0500

If you haven’t noticed, Rososo has been down for a few days. I apologize to those of you who relied on it and hope you haven’t turned your attention elsewhere.

What Happened?

The short of it is that the original design of the feed crawler succumbed to.. well, poor design. It is back up with some major improvements but has been put on bed rest for the time being at its cheep hosting solution while I secure a final resting place on a speedy, dedicated server.

For now, feeds will be updated every 30 minutes until I can get the new server set up. I’m hoping to pull this off tonight but it may not happen until later this week.

-Billy

Left: Daring Fireball as seen by Rososo users. Right: Daring...

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 18:15:00 -0400

Left: Daring Fireball as seen by Rososo users.

Right: Daring Fireball as seen by Google Reader users.

login bug fixed

Mon, 29 Sep 2008 11:11:10 -0400

Rososo was having trouble keeping you logged in. That bug was fixed last week; now you will stay logged in on multiple computers for a long time.

foreign-language reviews make me swoon

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 17:38:47 -0400

foreign-language reviews make me swoon:

“Veľmi, veľmi jednoduchá RSS čítačka, s netradičným prístupom k čítaniu nových článkov.” (last one, I swear)

Some nice press today for Rososo on Lifehacker and...

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 16:39:24 -0400

Some nice press today for Rososo on Lifehacker and ZenHabits.

Lifehacker says it could serve as a “My First Feed Reader” for anyone you’re trying to introduce to RSS. This is a good point — web syndication can be confusing for non-techie people. But bookmarks make perfect sense, are are perhaps more consistent with the link-based nature of the web.

Rososo: Der entspannte Feedreader

Wed, 24 Sep 2008 16:30:00 -0400

Rososo: Der entspannte Feedreader:

German produktivity site imgriff.com seems to like it!

Top 20 sites on Rososo

Tue, 23 Sep 2008 11:00:00 -0400

One week after launch, here are the most popular sites on Rososo, each with its total number of fans.

Jake and Amir, the duo, are the most popular by a significant margin. Individually, Amir beats Jake by a hair.

Engadget kills Gizmodo. Julia Allison ties Eric Lodwick. Outside of Connected Ventures, Kottke is king.

Jake And Amir Dot Com (45)
Ricky Van Veen’s GET EXCITED (36)
BeingFamous.com | Amir’s Online Home (28)
Jake’s Webbed Journal (27)
Kottke.org (26)
Daring Fireball (26)
Gawker (20)
TechCrunch (19)
Engadget (16)
Secret Enemy Hideout (14)
Eric Lodwick (11)
NonSociety: Julia (11)
CNN.com (10)
Perez Hilton (9)
Mareen Fischinger’s Tumblelog (9)
Dooce (9)
Lifehacker (9)
Gizmodo (8)
The New York Times (8)
What Would Tyler Durden Do? (8)
JeffRubinJeffRubin.com (8)

We just pushed a new design for Rososo. Our goal goal was to...

Fri, 19 Sep 2008 17:01:00 -0400

We just pushed a new design for Rososo. Our goal goal was to simplify and to make the experience more meaningful.

We achieved simplification by removing the logo.

We achieved meaningfulization by making the “fresh” bookmarks bigger and hiding the “stale” bookmarks. The previous design showed stale & fresh bookmarks together, with the only distinction being color: an neon-puke green or rotten orange.