Feedonomics

At the same time we were simplifying the site interface for people who don’t know what OPML is, we also built a text editor for those of you who do. Hey, we’re OPML geeks after all. You can reach this from your My Files page. Only files that are stored on our server are editable, which means you either have to add it from your computer, or enter the URL of a remote file and click the “Copy to Grazr.com” checkbox. How will you know if a file is editable? It will have an “Edit Source” link next it. Clicking this link will open the file in the editor.

This was supposed to be a very simple editor, but we got a little carried away. It has line numbers, word wrapping, and a find option. We even added a built-in OPML validator. The validator is still a little primitive, but we have ideas on making it more robust.

The simplest way to test the editor is to change the title in the header section of the file, and then save the results. You will be taken to the read page for this file, where you will see the file inside the widget with the new title. Pretty cool, huh? We’re hoping you’ll also find this an easy way to edit GrazrScript programs.   

The one feature we didn’t add to the editor was a “Create a New File” option. We figured that most people would use this to just tweak existing OPMLs that they got from a feed reader, so we didn’t want to complicate the interface with this feature. You can also start with a simple OPML file as a template, and then modify it for other uses.

This is just our first pass at an OPML editor. We have much more ambitious plans that I’ll be able to share with you real soon now. Stay tuned.

We just launched the new features I told you about last week. I think you will agree that it was worth waiting an extra few days for us to get this right. I’ll provide details in the next posts, but here is a summary:

Simpler workflow for adding feeds and reading lists. Our use of multiple options to either upload files from your computer or copy them from the web was just too confusing. You told us that, and we could see it from watching what people added to the site. Now it is much easier, we hope. From the My Files page you can either click one button to add a feed, or another button to add a reading list to the site.

Text editor with OPML validation. You can now edit OPML files that are hosted on Grazr.com. What is cool is that you can easily switch from the editor to viewing the file in the widget. This is only the first of several editors for OPML that we plan on introducing, but we feel it is a good start.

Last week I promised that we would release a text editor for files hosted on Grazr.com. We got that finished on schedule, but then when we were testing it we realized that the whole copy/upload/bookmark model is too damn confusing. So we ended up completely redoing that. We go that finished by Friday, but then we realized that it will require some modifications to the database schema. None of us were eager to do that late on Friday and then face a weekend of nursemaiding the servers, so we held the whole upgrade off until next week. Sigh. Software is misnamed. It is really hard. We will have all of this on the site next week for sure. I’d rather be embarrassed about being late than take a chance of messing up anyone’s data.