BazQux Reader news

Mark above or below as read and article menu

Vladimir Shabanov — Mon, 27 Jul 2020 18:00:00 +0300

Yes, you can now mark all articles above or below current one as read!

There are several ways you can do it. There are new items in “Mark all as read” menu:

There are keyboard shortcuts:

Shift + Q — mark above as read
Shift + Z — mark below as read

And there’s right-click article menu:

Marking above or below as read works everywhere: feeds, starred or tagged items, smart streams, comments and search in everything referred above. And it doesn’t just mark loaded articles: marking below as read marks everthing till the end of the feed no matter loaded or not. So you can quicly dismiss older articles if you don’t want to read them.

Since BazQux Reader has comments this feature turned out to be much more complex than expected. For example, comments in already read (and not visible) articles are marked as read too (like “Mark all as read” does) so they don’t surprise you when you change view mode. And of course there are many corner cases in marking above or below from comment (hope that I handled them all ;).

As a side effect, “Mark all as read” now works in “Starred items” and “Tags” too (was silently ignored previously).

And there are options to unstar or untag above or below when you’re in starred or tagged items feed.

Right click (long tap on mobile) on article headers in list view or on preview images in mosaic or magazine view to show article menu. On mobile you could use right-to-left swipe. On desktop you could right click at the bottom of the article or between blue cursor and article text.

It solves years long problem of saving and sharing in the middle of the article. It’s especially handy on mobile where almost any article is long enough to hide article buttons while you’re scrolling.

Additional menu items appear in comments (go to parent comment or post, collapse or expand children comments) and expanded list/mosaic/magazine articles (collapse article).

Tag and share buttons are no longer shown in articles on narrow mobile screen. It leaves more space for article titles and you could still tag and share via article menu.

Unread counters in “Starred items” and “Tags”

Starred and tagged feeds show number of unread items now. You could use this feature to track new comments in specific posts. Tag your post with some tag, then set tag view mode to first one (with comments expanded). Tag’s unread counter will show number of unread comments in tagged posts (source feed could still have comments collapsed and only show new posts).

This feature also turned out to be more complex than expected and led to a big rewrite in how unread numbers are counted. As a result unread numbers update faster, use less traffic and several nasty bugs were fixed.

Don’t know whether you’ve seen folder showing 1 unread item after all feeds in this folder were read but I’ve tried to get rid of this for years and now it finally fixed! Negative unread counts after “Skip” or “Ignore” in smart streams are also gone.

Smart streams and fiters speedup

The more people use reader the more filters & smart streams they have. And when people have 200 smart streams working on 2000 feeds it’s time to optimize things a bit ;)

Smart streams and filters are now updated 2-4 times faster. It’s especially visible on first page load. Editing is faster too thanks to much less traffic used.

Price increase

Year subscription now costs $30. I’ve increased price in March. Price stayed the same since 2014 and many features were added so I decided to increase it. BazQux Reader is still 2-3 times cheaper than other readers with comparable feature set.

Reader is profitable since 2014. There was a slow decline of a number of active users since 2014 till mid-2019. Now there’s growth in both active and new users (actually, there are more new users each year since 2017 but until 2019 it was not enough to offset churn of people coming from Google Reader Apocalypse of 2013).

But there’s growth in costs too. While server costs are roughly the same, other costs have increased. I have two daughters now (and waiting for a boy!), need to rent office so I can focus, need to rent bigger apartment. So I came to a point where BazQux earns me enough for living but not enough for growth of the service.

I think that reader is really cool now (many features are still missing, but the look and mobile interface are wonderful) and most competitors are either out of business or started asking money so it’s time to make more serious advertising and I need money for this.

Help unsuspending @BazQuxReader account on Twitter

Update (September, 2020): Twitter has unsuspended @BazQuxReader account. No communication about reasons but it works now and that’s good.

Previous content of this section for history:

For some unknown reason Twitter has suspended @BazQuxReader account in May. I haven’t even used it for a couple weeks before this.

I’ve sent a request to Twitter to unsuspend account but 2.5 months passed and I still haven’t received any answer. If anybody is working at Twitter I would be grateful if you can help me in unsuspending @BazQuxReader account.

NB: There are no issues with “Log in with Twitter” and fetching Twitter feeds since they’re linked with my developer account.

For reporting issues, please, mail support@bazqux.com or use Discourse community.

And some more…

Feed Creator service from Five Filters is now hosted on createfeed.bazqux.com and is free for BazQux Reader users (other readers are blocked). It allows you to create feed from webpages that doesn’t have one (requires basic knowledge of HTML & CSS).
PDF Newsletter, another service from FiveFilters is hosted on pdf.bazqux.com. You could try it to make a PDF from your public feed for starred items or any other feed.
Automatic switch to dark theme when OS is set to dark mode (color theme in Appearance dialog is set for current OS mode, so you can set different themes for dark and light modes).
Link updates in feeds are now handled.
Newly subscribed feeds are automatically added to filters and smart streams that work with more than half of your feeds.
Twitter threads are shown when exclude_replies option is used (were excluded as replies previously).
Added support for audio and documents in Telegram channels.
The height of videos is limited so that they fit fully into the screen.
Faster updates of Facebook feeds.
Faster loading of proxied video.
Faster loading of article comments (previously next articles were also loaded when there are few comments).
Search in streams or folders that are grouped by feed respects user feeds order (by drag’n’drop).
Newsboat console feed reader supports BazQux Reader. It’s not for everybody but true veterans may like it ;)

Happy reading!

Email registration and account management

Vladimir Shabanov — Wed, 20 Nov 2019 17:00:00 +0300

Hi, today’s BazQux Reader update is quite boring but necessary one. Now you can register and log in using email & password:

A bit of history. In 2012, I was so tired of inventing a new password for each new service that sometimes I didn’t even sign up due to this. That’s why I decided to make a one-click social login to BazQux Reader.

Over the time traditional email registration became one of the most voted features on UserVoice but I resisted since it is complex (ton of corner cases) task and there was a lot of other things to do.

Meanwhile, Safari then Firefox added automatic password generation and registering via email became much easier. At the same time everybody understood that Google is not a “don’t be evil” company (and I’d better to not talk about F-company). So more and more people wanted to get rid of accounts in these questionable companies that track you and sell your data to advertisers. And there are more and more people that do not have a Google, Facebook or Twitter account at all (and that’s great). But they want to have a BazQux Reader account and starting to ask me how to do it almost every week. So it was time to implement email registration.

There are more things that you could do besides registering. Go to settings ⇒ Account

to open account management dialog:

Here you can change your account email, username (it’s not necessary now but could save you some typing when logging in from mobile devices or apps) and password.

You can still use one-click login via Google, Facebook, Twitter or OpenID. It’s possible to add several login methods in “Associated accounts” section as well as remove all of them and leave email & password login only.

If you have Twitter or Facebook feeds then adding corresponding account will help to fetch them faster since your access token will be used (with separate per-user rate limits) to fetch your feeds instead of app access token (with global rate limit).

In “Status” section you could see when it’s time to renew and how many feeds you have.

And finally you can renew anytime you want by clicking “Buy now” in “Payments” section (and you can even donate if you’re on a lifetime subscription).

Other things:

You can subscribe to Telegram channels now (but beware that many popular Russian channels are used for black PR and propaganda).
Added support for right-to-left languages.

Happy reading!

Themes, typography and image proxy

Vladimir Shabanov — Tue, 18 Jun 2019 17:00:00 +0300

Hi, today I’m glad to announce a number of new features in BazQux Reader. Go to settings ⇒ Appearance (or press Shift+T) to see and configure them:

⇒

All appearance settings are applied immediately. No need to reload the page. Settings are saved per browser so you could have different appearance on desktop, laptop and mobile.

Themes

As you see there is a night theme. During the last year many people have asked about it and here it is:

And gray theme (which could be better at twilight):

And sepia one (great for long reads):

Fonts

You can choose the reader font. It turned out to be a much harder feature to add than a dark theme.

I’ve spent a lot of time reading articles in various fonts on various devices trying to find fonts that are readable in any setting, comfortable for prolonged reading, supports many languages, neutral yet beautiful and elegant. Resulting set is quite small so you could spend less time choosing font yet diverse—each font is unique and looks unlike any other in set. All fonts (except the system one) are bundled with BazQux Reader so they work the same on all devices and operating systems.

Default reader font was changed to Charter—highly readable font found in many books and on some popular sites like Medium. Default font size was increased too (since there is no point in 13px font on today screens) as well as line height. You could always switch back to the system font and decrease font size and line height in Appearance dialog to make reader look like it was. But I recommend you to read in new font (or choose your own). After some time you might like it more than the old one.

Most other feed readers allow you to change article font only leaving the rest of the interface as is. I decided to not cut corners: when you set font you set it for the whole reader and you get much more consistent view. To make things look even better, different font is used for UI and headers in some cases. Each font has its own vertical alignment and a lot of time was spent to line up all buttons, icons and labels.

Layout

Besides customizing text width and line height there are couple experimental options. You can center your feed (looks better on wide screens):

And you can make images take full available width while leaving text width as is. It may look strange with left aligned feed but it looks interesting with centered feed and it looks amazing in fullscreen mode which now always uses centered feed (press f to toggle fullscreen mode):

Typography

I’ve applied a lot of advice from the wonderful online book Practical typography. I recommend it to anyone writing anything for anybody (documents, letters, résumés, presentations, blog posts—everything wins from the good typography). Most visible things are:

Headers and post titles made less huge. In fact they’re only slightly bigger than text. Now, when looking at other sites I wonder: “Why your titles are so big? Have you read any book?”
Links are no more underlined. It leads to huge readability improvement (and to similar “Why you’ve underlined it? It’s impossible to read now”).
Block quotations have no strange vertical line to the left and no color.
Straight quotes ' are automatically replaced with apostrophes ’ where applicable.

There are numerous spacing and alignment tweaks to make reading more smooth.

And finally there is a hyphenation. It shines the most on narrow mobile screens. Compare text without and with hyphenation:

Right edge becomes less ragged and more text fits on the screen which leads to less scrolling.

Hyphenation rules vary per language so I implemented a language autodetection. It works for most major European languages but may not work well with mixed-language texts, short texts and texts in less popular languages (if your language is in this list but articles are not hyphenated, please, send a list of popular feeds in your language to support@bazqux.com so I could train a language detector).

All these tiny bits together improve readability a lot and efficiency of reading is a main focus of BazQux Reader. 99% of time you spend in BazQux you’re reading. And with latest changes you may feel that you’re reading a book not the web app.

Image proxy

The next major feature is an image proxy. All images are now proxied through BazQux Reader servers. HTML5 audio and video are proxied too (YouTube and other embeds are not proxied since it’s impossible to do). Images that are larger than text width (or browser width in full width images mode) are scaled down to save bandwidth and improve loading time and scrolling speed. Impact on image quality is negligible (browser will downscale image anyway). Larger versions of images will be loaded automatically if text or browser width changes.

Speed was the main reason for implementing image proxy since I’ve tired of investigating why reader is slow only to find that some nice small photo is actually 20 megapixel monster ;) But there are numerous other advantages of image proxy:

No browser’s mixed content warning.
All images load fine in Firefox strict privacy mode (it blocks images from Twitter/Facebook/VK otherwise).
Sites that prevent hotlinking (showing images on other sites including feed readers) may start to work.
Privacy: other sites do not know which images you have viewed.

If, for some reason, images are not loading you could always turn off image proxy in Appearance dialog (no need to reload the page, images from source sites will load automatically).

And some more…

Other things:

Mosaic view has full non-truncated titles, shows tags and the size of thumbnail scales with the font size.
Middle click or ctrl+click (or cmd+click in macOS) on header in list view or on image in mosaic/magazine view opens article in background tab and marks it as read.
Five Filters Full-Text RSS service is used for full text extraction instead of discontinued Mercury parser. I’ve purchased commercial license and self-host it on ftr.bazqux.com to be independent from always closing free services. As a bonus you can use it to convert truncated feeds to full ones (works only with BazQux Reader, other feed readers are blocked).
Local links (footnotes, article sections) are followed in reader without opening a new tab (use browser’s Back button to go back).
Image, audio and video enclosures are inserted into articles text in API so you could see them in mobile apps.
Placeholders are added for all HTML5 audio and video (and for Facebook videos) to delay their loading and increase browsing speed.
Video details requests (from placeholders) to YouTube/Vimeo are proxied. YouTube won’t track you until you click “play”.
Internet Explorer and pre 2016-2017 versions of other browsers are no longer supported. Your browser need to support CSS variables (used for themes and layout tuning) to run BazQux Reader.
I recommend to use Firefox. Changing theme or font size in Chrome/Safari may take several seconds while being immediate in Firefox.
This blog is now self-hosted (don’t want to depend on Blogger, although I think Google won’t close it).
There is a new Discourse community instead of discontinued Google+. It’s also used for comments on this blog so I welcome you to try it.

Happy reading!

Mobile web interface

Vladimir Shabanov — Mon, 23 Jul 2018 18:37:00 +0300

Open BazQux Reader on your mobile device. See it? Like it? Good! ;)

Left panel disappeared in desktop browser? Don't worry, just make window a bit wider.

OK, today I'm rolling out one of the biggest updates in BazQux Reader history—web interface optimised for smartphones. And it's not a kind of stripped down thing—it's complete desktop interface with all the functions but readable on small screen. You get all view modes, comments, settings, search, filters, sharing and saving—everything.

For a long time I didn't want to bother with mobile interface as there are a lot of great mobile apps that support BazQux Reader. But while these apps are great they still do not provide the same experience as BazQux website. Mobile feed reader apps works mostly like e-mail clients—they display one article a time and show a separate list of article titles. You need a lot of tapping and swiping to navigate. BazQux Reader is closer to modern social media feeds—continuous stream of posts where you just need to scroll down. It has a list view but it's only one of many view modes.

I've asked a number my clients about what they miss most in BazQux Reader and most frequent answer was a better mobile experience. So I decided to take a leap and finally improve it.

Look at screenshots. As you see list view becomes multiline on narrow screen:

Swipe right to show feeds panel (or use hamburger button in top left corner). Here you could select or add feeds and open settings menu (settings button is next to the "Add subscription" button).

Images and videos take full width of the screen:

I'm especially proud of this as it gives very modern user experience. And technically it does quite clever server-side preprocessing of article content so there are no jumping images—they all load in right position from the beginning.

Programmers will especially like that sections of preformatted text (<pre> tag) take full page width and have horizontal scrolling even in desktop mode (while usual article text is still limited in width to make it more readable). Same applies to tables—you could scroll if they're too wide.

Mixed view mode works great too:

I like this too, since mixed view mode is unique feature of BazQux Reader. You could quickly skim through titles of high volume blogs (in list view), see photos from photoblogs (in mosaic view) and read your must read blogs (in expanded view) all at the same time. No view mode switching, no clicking. Just scroll.

And things do not become slower as you scroll more and more. Reader unloads articles as they're moved away from the view (but it will load them again if you scroll up to reread something). YouTube and Vimeo videos are loaded lazily, only after you click on them. I don't know what YouTube did (too much tracking?) but put a dozen of YouTube videos on the page (just put, no play) and even desktop browser will become slow as hell. This is not the case with BazQux. You could scroll thousands of articles in picture- and video-rich blogs without any slowdown. On both desktop and mobile.

What's great is that new interface is not exactly mobile—it's responsive. For example, you get default desktop interface in landscape orientation of iPad but it get's mobile once your rotate your tablet to portrait mode.

Here is a demo video of how reader interface adapts to various screen sizes:

Toolbars, articles in every view mode, menus, dialogs—everything works well on every screen width and any font size.

It took a lot of time to reimplement almost every interface element and to test it on many devices. There are still some things to do but you can already enjoy the same desktop reader experience on your mobile device.

Little tip for Android users: to get even more app-like experience you could use "Add to home screen" option in your browser. iOS unloads home screen apps once you switch away from them (e.g., to open article in browser), so it's better to just use browser in iOS.

Few more assorted news:

Password protected feeds are now supported.
Instagram images and YouTube/Vimeo videos are embedded in tweets if they have links to them.
More tweets and Facebook posts are fetched at once to not lose anything.
Full text is retrieved from the first external link in Twitter/Facebook/VK/Google+ and Reddit feeds.
Blogs with large and infrequent posts are given a priority in search results to promote quality content.
Added handling of brain damaged GDPR consent in some feeds (some sites think that BazQux servers are EU citizens).
youtube-nocookie.com used for playing videos to lessen YouTube tracking.
Disabled showing of related YouTube videos at the end of playback so you don't waste your time.
Added ability to subscribe to VK topics.
Added "Font size" item to settings menu to change reader font size.

Happy reading!

Group by feed

Vladimir Shabanov — Sat, 05 Mar 2016 03:37:00 +0300

Hi! Long time without major new features. Time to break this bad habit ;)

As you can suspect I've added grouping of articles by feed. Some people prefer to read this way and it actually works quite well if you don't have too many high volume feeds.

You can separately enable grouping by feed for folders, latest stream, smart streams and starred or tagged items. Just go to feed menu and check "Group by feed" item:

And voila, you're going from this:

to this:

Feed titles stay on top while you're scrolling:

Nice!

And it's now possible to bulk unstar or untag items (from the feed menu or right-click menu):

It's useful to remove those old starred items that you won't look into anyway or remove tag that you no longer need (but beware — there is no undo!).

Other features that are ready for quite some time but were too small to blog about:

Embedded Tweets and Instagram photos are shown properly in posts.
Search system stability is finally fixed (there were several outages due to it being overloaded).
Added searching by URL. Use link:example.com to find articles containing specified link or item_link:example.com/post1 to find articles that links to specified URL (ignoring article text).
Multiple images, videos and quoted tweets are supported in Twitter feeds.
Fixed issue with ad-blockers halting reader on posts about advertising.

Next thing planned is improved sharing.

Happy reading!

Subscribing to YouTube feeds

Vladimir Shabanov — Wed, 03 Jun 2015 02:02:00 +0300

TL;DR: All old YouTube feeds still work in BazQux.

Hi, some time ago YouTube decided to deprecate their RSS feeds (calling it a switch from API v2 to API v3). They left undocumented feeds for users & channels but search, most viewed and subscriptions feeds were completely removed.

It's unfortunate trend when services remove RSS feeds. Both Facebook and Twitter have removed them, Google+ did not bother to have them at all.

What they don't understand is that people who used to reading via RSS reader don't start visiting website if you remove RSS feeds. They will just abandon it.

Another thing they don't understand is that API doesn't help casual user. RSS allows automation that non-programmer can use. Just put your feed into IFTTT, Zapier, Yahoo! Pipes, you name it, and do anything you want without writing a line of code.

Removing those "outdated" XML RSS feeds in favor of shiny new JSON APIs is like replacing e-mail with the next chat app. Some people just prefer e-mail.

But enough complaining.

All old YouTube feeds are still supported in BazQux Reader (calling YouTube API v3 internally).

And you can directly subscribe to YouTube channels, users, playlists and search by pasting their URLs.

There are few more old feeds that don't have direct analog on YouTube site so you need to know their format to subscribe in BazQux.

List of new videos from user subscriptions (BTW, it required a lot of API calls to implement it):

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/users/USERNAME/newsubscriptionvideos

If you get 403 errors please uncheck "Keep all my subscriptions private" in YouTube privacy settings.

Most popular videos today (you can replace US with any other 2-letter country code):

http://gdata.youtube.com/feeds/api/standardfeeds/US/most_viewed

FeedMe Android app

Vladimir Shabanov — Wed, 03 Jun 2015 01:56:00 +0300

Hi, glad to say that there is one more Android app available for BazQux Reader and it's FeedMe.

What I like in this app is that it's a golden middle between design and features.

It looks clean and not overloaded yet it has most features you need for reading.

The thing I liked the most is the ability to turn off sync for some feeds. I have a number of high volume feeds which I read only occasionally. But mobile apps don't know about this and sync thousands of items I don't care instead of dozens that I really need. With FeedMe I can sync only what I really want to read and that's great.

Another thing I like is that FeedMe uses wide enough margins for article text. Many apps reduce margin width to fit as much text as possible on phone screen but it actually makes text harder to read (at least for me).

I invite everybody to try this app. It's free (although I wish paid version to appear to make FeedMe sustainable).

And thank you, Shawn Zhang for supporting BazQux Reader in your wonderful app!

Filters and smart streams

Vladimir Shabanov — Fri, 25 Apr 2014 17:50:00 +0300

Today BazQux Reader update is a big one. I've added two features filters and smart streams that help you to hide uninteresting posts and to monitor interesting ones.

How filters work? Imagine you've tired from Apple related news and want to hide them. Select the feed which you want to filter and search for "apple" (you can select folder or Latest if you want to hide items everywhere). There will be two new buttons on top of the search results:

Click on New filter and you'll see the following dialog:

Click Hide found items and that's all. No Apple news anymore ;)

As you can see there are two types of filters: one that hides and one that shows. Latter is useful for feeds where you want to read only very specific news (e.g., only Apple news).

Note that hidden items are really hidden. They aren't marked as read and will appear again if you delete the filter. They're also ignored when you click Mark all as read or select Show all option for the feed. And they won't show in further search results too.

Unlike rules/actions approach taken by some RSS readers, filters hide not only new items (when action triggers) but existing items too.

And of course filters are automatically supported by mobile apps. Apps just don't see hidden items.

Smart streams? Imagine you're Apple fanboy and want to see related news first. Search for "apple" and click New smart stream:

And voilà, you've got a new virtual feed that has all articles about Apple. It shows number of unread items and the number updates automatically when you read article either in smart stream or in the source feed.

Like filters, smart streams work on both new and existing items. They have all the usual bells and whistles:

You can even enable public feed for smart stream and create complex workflows with IFTTT. For example you can setup IFTTT to send you a mail when a new article matching monitored keyword appears in your feeds.

Smart streams are shown as tags in mobile apps or as hot links in apps that work via Fever API. Only unread items are synced (since the most apps show all tagged items by default).

At any moment you can edit or delete filters and smart streams in Filters & streams setting:

It lists all your filters and smart streams with search queries and feeds where they are active:

By pressing edit you can change search query and select any set of feeds you like:

It's very useful when you want to apply the same filter to separate feeds or to exclude some feeds/folders from a smart stream.

There are many improvements in the search itself. Previously it only returned first 100 results, hadn't worked well on more than 500 feeds, incorrectly calculated number of unread results in some cases and not worked in tags with spaces in names. All these issues are fixed now.

Now you can even press Mark all as read and it will correctly mark current search results as read (button was ignored previously). Handy when you want to quickly dismiss some items.

Some other news:

Reeder 2 for Mac public beta have been released. It supports Fever API. Just add a Fever account and set bazqux.com as a server.

Unread iPhone app added support for Fever accounts too. Now there is one more very cool iPhone client for BazQux Reader.

I published a small Chrome app which adds a link to the reader in Chrome apps page (for those who like this way to open website). Rate it 5 stars. Help to spread the word in Chrome webstore. And of course you're welcome to like the reader on AlternativeTo ;)

Happy reading!

One-click add to Pocket, “Mark all as read” date ranges and more

Vladimir Shabanov — Sat, 22 Feb 2014 02:19:00 +0300

Hi, some new features were added to BazQux Reader.

You can now add articles to Pocket in one click without opening new browser tab:

On the first click there will be an option to authorize to Pocket. After authorization next saves will be one-click.

It's now possible to chose data range in 'Mark all as read' menu. So you can mark only old articles as read. Very useful when there are too many posts in some blogs.

I've also added options to unsubscribe from all feeds and to delete account:

Besides subscriptions menu, delete account option is also added to the free trial expiration dialog. Privacy is very important aspect and while only 1/1000th of registered uses have requested account deletion I still implemented it.

There are few improvements in the feeds fetcher. Post contents are now updated when they're changed in the feed. And subscribers count is now reported to publishers in the User-Agent header.

But the most important thing I did is the automatic removing of unused feeds and accounts with expired free trials. That means I now need to fetch few times less feeds and use less servers. This also means that feeds from popular sites (that host many feeds but don't have real-time updates, like Reddit, Twitter, LiveJournal or Google News) are updated faster. Since most sites do not allow more than a few downloads per second I'm rate limiting my feeds fetcher and the lesser feeds I have, the smaller is the download queue and the faster are updates.

It's a great strength of paid only feed readers. Unlike in freemium products you don't pay for other's feeds (that's why I can afford to set the low $9/year price) and you get faster updates.

During past several months I've gradually reduced server costs 3 times. Now I'm using only 5 servers (although quite powerful ones). This means that even newly registered users alone are now covering most of the server costs. With 85% of weekly active users and 3 times less server costs I hope that this year's profits will be much better than previous one (most of them were spent on the servers).

Next thing planned is a big one. I'm going to add ability to apply filters or save them as a feed so it'll be possible to hide uninteresting posts and to monitor interesting ones.

PS: If you'd like Unread app to support BazQux Reader just tweet its developer or mail unread at jaredsinclair dot com.

Happy reading!

Ur/Web and BazQux Reader

Vladimir Shabanov — Thu, 16 Jan 2014 23:50:00 +0300

This post is for programmers.

As some of you may know, BazQux Reader is written in Haskell and Ur/Web.

I've made a (rather long) post about my experience with Ur/Web and the reader to the Ur/Web mailing list:
http://www.impredicative.com/pipermail/ur/2014-January/001608.html

(also posted to Hacker News and r/Haskell since most probably you're not a member of this mailing list ;)

What's more. I've published Ur/Web part of BazQux Reader sources:
https://github.com/bazqux/bazqux-urweb

It's not the full sources of the reader. But this is a major part of frontend and I think it would be interesting for programmers to see how it works.

If you have questions don't hesitate to ask me here, on Hacker News or Reddit.

Subscriptions search

Vladimir Shabanov — Fri, 27 Dec 2013 04:53:00 +0300

That was a hot year for me and BazQux Reader. Thanks to your numerous e-mails and UserVoice requests I've added a lot of new features.

BazQux got supported by many mobile apps. It got Google Reader-like list view, starred and tagged items, hardened its infrastructure, gained auto refresh, drag and drop subscriptions reordering, improved keyboard navigation and many other small features.

And today it got very important new feature that any solid RSS reader should have -- subscriptions search.

Add subscription dialog was completely redone. Now you can just enter blog title or a part of blog URL to search and subscribe for it:

Besides URL or title you can look for topics by using hashtag. Like #comics:

And there are about 40 topics to chose if you have no idea what are you looking for ;) I even need two screenshots to fit them all:

And, as always, you can just paste the site or feed URL and press Enter to immediately subscribe to the feed.

The thing I'm especially proud of is that search result depends on your country. So you get one news sites list in USA and another one in Germany or Russia.

For most people country should be detected automatically but in case it's wrong (or you just want to look what people read in other country) there is an option to change it at the bottom of the topics list:

I've put few major countries on top but there are more than 200 of them to chose (although search results vary only for countries with the most registered users):

There are about 0.5M feeds to chose. For privacy reasons only feeds with 10 or more subscribers are listed (or feeds with standard names like blog.example.com/feed).

Another privacy note. Topics you search for (and see under some feed names) are taken from folder names where you put your subscriptions. At least 5 different people must put the same feed into the folder with the same name for this folder to become a topic. I'm filtering out folders with names like "family", "friends" and so on. And I have manually viewed about 2K of used topics to be sure that they're really look like topics and not like some private folder. Thanks to "at least 5 different people" rule most folders to filter out were actually named "daily", "other", "to read", etc.

I don't see any way to deduce sensible information of any of you by using subscriptions search. Used topic (folder) names are neutral, only popular feeds or feeds with standard names are indexed (no private feeds should appear in search) and of course there is no way to see who subscribed to the feed.

Maybe it's clean anyway that some anonymized personal information is used in subscriptions search. Just want to be clear about what information is used and how.

And a bit more about ordering of results.

For country dependent search results at least 10 people from the same country should be subscribed to the feed. Otherwise total subscribers number is used for sorting search results. So if you browse topics and don't see some popular local blog just tell more people in your country to use BazQux Reader! ;)

Noisy feeds with too many posts per day as well as feeds that haven't updated for a long time are penalized and go down in search results.

I decided to not show subscribers counts. It looked ugly and attracted too much attention (human eye always looks for digits first when sees the text).

I hope you will like today's update. It should be much easier now to discover new feeds.

News+ (gReader) Android app available on Google Play

Vladimir Shabanov — Fri, 27 Dec 2013 02:48:00 +0300

Happy to announce that News+ Android app from the author of gReader is finally released on Google Play.

News+ was the first app that supported BazQux Reader. But for a long time it was in beta and only available for download from GitHub.

News+ uses an interesting approach. It is based on gReader code but instead of adding new services into one app it uses extensions mechanism (more on difference between News+ and gReader). So you need to install two apps:

BazQux Reader extension (Play Store)
and News+ app itself (Play Store)

There are still a few bugs. If you have more than 1000 unread items and set an option to sync them (default sync limit is 1000 unread items) it won't sync them till you clear the cache (option in menu). And read states are synced back to the website only on syncs or when you change feeds or folders (rather inconvenience than a bug). But overall experience is quite good.

gReader has millions of installs and is probably the most popular Android RSS reader app. It's great to see its successor News+ to be finally published on Google Play. News+ is a very feature-rich and customizable reader and I suggest anyone having Android device to try it.

Thank you, noinnion! And congratulations with the release!

Public feeds, IFTTT, keyboard navigation, larger fonts

Vladimir Shabanov — Thu, 21 Nov 2013 03:00:00 +0300

Hi, glad to announce some new features.

Now you can create a public feeds for your starred and tagged items, folders and latest items. Right click on the feed source:

Choose a Public feed menu item and you'll see the following dialog:

Public feed is disabled by default. Click Enable button and voilà, you've got the feed:

You can always disable public feed or generate the new address if the old one become compromised.

The interesting way to use such feeds is to automate your workflow with IFTTT (I've even added a direct link to a new recipe). Just select the feed channel, paste feed URL and use whatever action you want. For example, you can automatically send your starred items to Pocket, or save them to Evernote.

Another new thing is a keyboard navigation within your subscriptions list. Here are the new shortcuts:

Shift+J, Shift+N — next subscription
Shift+K, Shift+P — previous subscription
Shift+X — expand/collapse current folder
Shift+U — select parent folder
d then a — display latest items
d then s — display starred items
d then d — open subscription selector (my favorite one)
d then u — open feed selector
d then f — open folder selector
d then t — open tag selector

That's how subscription selection dialog looks like:

It searches by both subscription title and the feed URL (so you can type "flickr" and see all flickr feeds even if they don't have "flickr" in title). Just try it.

And to further simplify keyboard navigation, spacebar (or j/n) on the last article automatically switches you to the next unread feed.

Few more shortcuts for those of you who prefer larger fonts:

- or = — change article font size
_ or + — change reader font size

I have quite a poor eyesight and designed BazQux Reader to look good even with huge browser fonts (unlike many other sites whose designers think everybody have 20/20 vision). But default font size was chosen to match one of the Google Reader or Wikipedia. Now you can change it without configuring your browser.

One more small feature is the ability to see feed address. Chose Feed address from feed or context menu to see the feed URL:

And half-dozen more small improvements:

Fixed spacebar sometimes selecting next article while current one is not yet fully read (especially annoying in list view).
Shift+Click on article header in list view marks article read/unread.
Subscribe bookmarklet (drag the link to your bookmarks bar, link also available in Resources section of Help).
N/P skips already read comment threads (nice for long discussions). J/K still select each comment.
U scrolls to post top
Escape goes to parent comment/post if current one is already collapsed.

Hope you will like today's update.

Next thing planned is subscriptions search.

Today’s downtime

Vladimir Shabanov — Sun, 17 Nov 2013 23:27:00 +0300

Hi, you may wonder why BazQux Reader wasn't available today.

Everything is fine with reader itself. But my hosting provider had experienced a major DDoS attack (60 Gbit/s at least).

For about 10 minutes whole datacenter was offline (at 13:46 GMT). Then major part of traffic was blocked for an hour. Then things improved a bit. Unfortunately, most of the USA (where the most of BQ customers are) was blocked for 3 more hours. So it was about 4 hours of downtime in total for some customers.

Since the feeds are fetched from all around the world there was 30% of fetch timeouts during first hour and about 5-10% during the next three. So some feeds will be updated later than usual.

It's a first time I'm seeing network problems with my hosting provider. Hope they won't occur too often and you will continue to enjoy 100% uptime like it was in the last few months.

Drag and drop subscriptions reordering, translation and some more

Vladimir Shabanov — Mon, 21 Oct 2013 02:34:00 +0300

Subscriptions reordering was one of the top requests for a long time. And now it's here!

You can change order of feeds, folders, tags and even starred items in your subscriptions list using simple drag and drop.

The right-click context menus have been added. They allow to do basic actions like renaming, unsubscribing and assigning folders without selecting the feed first.

As you can see there are few more new options. You can reset ordering everywhere, top level only or in particular folder.

And there is an option for those who what to see exact unread counts instead of 500+.

One more new feature for people reading foreign blogs is the article translation using Google Translate. It's available in the article menu or via Shift+V and Shift+B keyboard shortcuts.

Only article content (or content from Readability) is translated instead of full article web page to help you read faster.

Next things planned are feeds for starred and tagged items and improved keyboard navigation.

Auto refresh, finally

Vladimir Shabanov — Sun, 22 Sep 2013 04:02:00 +0300

Happy to announce that one of the most requested features is now available.

At the beginning I decided to not implement auto refresh since it can distract from reading and distract free reading is one of my top priorities at BazQux. That's why post time and message buttons are in the far top right corner and simple thin line used to separate posts instead of heavy box filled with buttons. I believe that RSS readers are for reading and shouldn't focus on form over function.

But many people have requested an auto refresh. Some people even thought that BazQux doesn't update feeds. So I changed my opinion and did what you've asked ;)

Counters aren't blinking on update so it's still not so much distracting.

And some more:

"Mark all as read" now refreshes articles list to show new posts (if any) appeared since you selected the feed.
Selecting feed/folder/latest shows you all new posts instead of only those appeared before last page refresh (this can slowdown selecting large folders a bit).
"r" keyboard shortcut now refreshes unread counters of all subscriptions and reloads currently selected feed.

Hope you'll like today's update.

Next thing planned is feeds reordering.

Reeder, Press and ReadKit via Fever API

Vladimir Shabanov — Sat, 07 Sep 2013 00:25:00 +0300

BazQux Reader supports Fever API now. This means that any mobile or desktop app with Fever support can work with BQ. Remark that it's not an official support. So if something goes wrong please ask me not the app developers.

First of all you'll need to set your password again even if you have set it earlier. Fever uses different password hash algorithm and I'm not keeping passwords on my servers -- only hashes. So please go to Settings => Mobile login and set or change your password:

(it can be unnecessary to reset password if you have used reader from mobile apps during last few days).

And now you can setup Reeder:

Press

and ReadKit

For more security you can write https://bazqux.com instead of simple bazqux.com (defaults to http).

Due to Fever API limitations starred items are synced only when they belong to existing subscriptions (items imported from Google Reader or items from feeds you have unsubscribed won't sync).

Press uses suboptimal syncing algorithm so first sync can take a while before you start seeing unread items. And Press syncs only unread items from last week by default (I recommend you to adjust this setting to a month and recreate Fever account). I'll try to contact Press developers to improve their syncing and request an option to keep all unread items without time limit.

ReadKit redownloads all unread items on each sync. So it can sync for a while when you have many unreads. And sometimes it hangs for a minute on restarts. It's already fixed in ReadKit beta (thank you Balazs!) and will be available on the next ReadKit update.

And Reeder just works great as expected ;)

Enjoy!

Infrastructure improvements and some more

Vladimir Shabanov — Thu, 29 Aug 2013 23:58:00 +0300

I was pretty quiet last month. There was a lot of work to do on the server side and a lot of small bugs to fix.

While BazQux Reader is running on many servers web part was running only on a single machine as well as a feed fetcher. Only database and search index were distributed. You might be surprised how it worked that fast on a single machine serving thousands of people and a single machine fetching millions of feeds. Answer is simple -- Haskell. Instead of using slow interpreted languages like Ruby, Python or PHP, BazQux Reader is written in Haskell which is compiled language and about 10-30 times faster. That's the source of speed (as well as SSDs and dedicated servers instead of cloud).

But everything has its limits and there was only 2x capacity with previous architecture. So I decided to spent few weeks on improving things. Both web part and feed fetcher are distributed now. That means that there is at least 10x capacity for new users (for example, feed fetcher is now able to perform 100M feed and comment page fetches a day).

Many "this feed is not updating" bugs were fixed. Most important is handling of feeds that change their address. Few glitches in API were fixed as well.

Few minor new features:

"E" key to mail current article's link.
"Escape" key closes opened list view item.
Audio/video podcasts can be opened in a popup window.
You can change order of feeds in Mr. Reader or Feeddler and it will be reflected on site.

I welcome you to the new Google+ community where you can ask questions or see little news before they come to blog (UserVoice is still preferred for feature requests since it helps me to prioritize tasks).

You could also help BazQux Reader to grow:

Vote on alternativeto.net
Tweet on replacereader.com
Post on Google+
Or share on Facebook

And the best thing you could do to help is to write small blog post about the reader. This would be really great!

Now I'm confident that BazQux can easily handle more load without lost of speed and feed refresh rate and can finally focus on implementing new features!

Next things planned are auto refresh, Fever API (so it'll be possible to use Reeder, Press and ReadKit) and reordering of feeds.

Stay tuned ;)

Slow Feeds app

Vladimir Shabanov — Thu, 29 Aug 2013 23:40:00 +0300

The new version of Slow Feeds app for iPhone and iPad is available and guess what... it supports BazQux Reader!

Thank you Stefan!

Slow Feeds is unusual app. It doesn't allow you to select feeds or folders. It gives you another angle on your feeds instead.

When I first tried it I've seen empty Slow Feeds section and thought it's not working. But then I've pressed a button to show already read items and there were precisely those most interesting posts I've already read by manually clicking on feeds. So the "Slow Feeds" idea is working (not with 100% hit rate but quite good).

Another interesting feature is a Hot links section. I have few high volume feeds (that aren't read most of the time) and it turned out they're often links to the same news. And Slow Feeds allows you to quickly look what's hot today. I'm finding this feature quite useful and will probably add it to BazQux sometime in the future.

Images section is also quite nice (I have few photoblog feeds, that's why there is a mosaic view in BQ). And in general Slow Feeds looks very pleasant.

While Slow Feed surely won't suit everybody's reading needs I recommend you give it a try. Very unusual experience.

Scheduled Maintenance this Wednesday

Vladimir Shabanov — Sun, 14 Jul 2013 21:10:00 +0300

BazQux Reader will be not available for about 4 hours at 8:30 GMT (1:30 AM PDT, 4:30 AM EDT, 12:30 MSK, 5:30 PM JST) this Wednesday, July 17th.

I need to move the servers to a new dedicated rack with plenty of free slots to be able to add more servers in the future without downtime.

While I'm having capacity to serve at least 2x more load without any hassle, I need to be able to scale the system easy.

Unfortunately, my hosting provider can't directly connect racks or guarantee steady high speed between racks. While it's possible to move servers without downtime I'm afraid there can be problems with a speed and stability of the service. So I decided to move them at once. There is also an option to use Riak Enterprise to make an online copy of the database but it costs much more than a few hours of downtime.

BazQux Reader is running on 8 powerful dedicated servers at the moment. While it could seem to be quite a low number it's actually 256GB RAM, 4TB SSD and 64 cores total. There are 8 even more powerful servers waiting to join in the new rack and there is still a free space for more servers.

So if you wonder why there were not many new features during the last few weeks -- it's because of I'm working on scaling the system. BazQux Reader is probably the fastest reader on market and I'm working proactively to maintain this state (while fixing little bugs, answering ton of mails and implementing new features ;).

And the next week I'm planning to finally implement auto removing of expired free trial accounts (feeds and comments are still fetched for all the people who ever imported subscriptions to BazQux -- that's 10M+ fetches a day), so I can handle even more load.

Then I will turn back to add more features: auto refresh, subscriptions reordering, keyboard navigation in the subscriptions list, more tight integration with sharing/bookmarking services, themes, filtering ... you name it.

And few more news:

JustReader Android app added support for BazQux. Get it on Google Play.
Vienna RSS released new Beta that supports BazQux Reader (you probably need to restart it after you set your login & password in sync settings).
There is a version of RSSOwl (60MB, Mac/Windows) with BQ support (although I found RSSOwl to be very slow on my subscriptions).
You can open articles in background by pressing 'b' (Chrome/Safari)
Fixed issue with handling some invalid feeds that previously shown only one post and didn't updated.
Fixed issue with uploading of large Takeout.zip and uploading in Opera/IE.

Sorry for inconvenience this Wednesday.

Happy Birthday, BazQux!

Vladimir Shabanov — Sat, 29 Jun 2013 22:17:00 +0300

Starred and tagged items

Vladimir Shabanov — Wed, 26 Jun 2013 05:22:00 +0300

Happy to say that I've just rolled out one of the most frequently requested features -- Starred items (favorites) and tags.

First of all, please, import your starred and tagged items from Google Reader before July 1st! I will implement importing from Takeout.zip later but it does not contain tags.

To import directly from Google Reader select Starred items and press Import starred and tagged items button:

You'll see this button only if no import is yet done. If you need to import again, go to Add subscription dialog:

And how it looks:

You can now star articles, assign multiple tags and even view all tagged items in one stream. And search is supported, just like everywhere else.

There are two ways to assign tags. Using mouse:

or by entering from keyboard (press t for this dialog):

To star current article use s key or just click on star.

As you can see tags looks much like they look in Gmail. You can remove tag by clicking x, or you may view all items with this tag by clicking its name.

Few things are missing at the moment. Mark all as read is not yet working on tags and global tag renaming/removing is not here too.

Important note. All imported articles will be detached from the same articles in feeds and it will be impossible to mark them unread. Unfortunately there is no simple way to find correspondence between imported and existing articles.

What's next?

There are a lot of features to do. Probably auto refresh of unread counts will be the next one. But I need to take some rest and optimize things a bit to maintain the same high performance in the next few weeks.

PS: Chrome notifier extension is available.

Feeddler Pro for iPhone

Vladimir Shabanov — Fri, 21 Jun 2013 20:17:00 +0300

Happy to say that iPhone version of Feeddler Pro app now supports BazQux Reader and is available in App Store.

Thank you Che Bin Liu!

Mr. Reader iPad app is currently under Apple's review and should be available in App Store next week.

I'm about to finish with starred and tagged items. Just wait a few days ;) And you can already star and tag items in Feeddler!

Android app from the author of gReader

Vladimir Shabanov — Sun, 16 Jun 2013 21:22:00 +0300

Happy to say that author of gReader Android app recently released News+ app which will support many other readers through extensions mechanism.

And BazQux Reader is one of the first supported readers!

It's nice to have Google Reader API. gReader developer didn't even contacted me with questions related to API. Just rolled out a working app! Thank you!

To get started with News+ install NewsPlus_beta.apk and BazQuxExtension_beta.apk. Most recent versions should be available at News+ GitHub page.

Then you'll need to set your mobile login & password in options menu as described in previous post.

And then you'll get this:

Nice, isn't it?

News+ is currently in Beta stage. Some bugs may appear. Please report them in gReader Google group.

Some bad news. Press app developers declined to support BazQux Reader. They think they support enough RSS readers at the moment. Strange decision.

And some good news again. Author of JustReader have sent me a beta version for tests. A bit more work is needed to be done but he promised to release JustReader with BazQux support before July 1st!

Google Reader compatible API

Vladimir Shabanov — Tue, 11 Jun 2013 00:31:00 +0300

BazQux Reader now have Google Reader compatible API. It means that any mobile app which works with Google Reader can work with BazQux just by changing server address from google.com to bazqux.com.

BazQux Reader will be supported in the next updates of Mr. Reader (iPad) and Feeddler (iPad/iPhone).

Developers of JustReader (Android) and SlowFeeds (iPhone/iPad) are busy at the moment but will take a look later.

Unfortunately there is still no answer from Reeder, gReader, Press and Newsify. Please, ask them (or your favorite app developers) to add support for BazQux Reader.

I want to thank Oliver Fürniß (Mr. Reader developer) for all the help he provided during development of API. He replied my mails quickly, pointed out my mistakes and provided test version of Mr. Reader even before I've implemented basic API calls. And looking how Mr. Reader handled API errors I must say that it's a very high quality product.

When the new versions of Mr. Reader and Feeddler will be available on App Store you'll need to set your login & password in Mobile login menu item:

and then log in from mobile app.

What's next?

Now I'm working full throttle on starred and tagged items. I'm planning to release them in a week or so. They are already supported in mobile apps and the import from Google Reader is done too. Just wait a bit ;)

PS: A little bonus for Opera users. Opera notifier extension for BazQux Reader is now available!

BazQux Reader news

Mark above or below as read and article menu

Article menu

Unread counters in “Starred items” and “Tags”

Smart streams and fiters speedup

Price increase

Help unsuspending @BazQuxReader account on Twitter

And some more…

Email registration and account management

Themes, typography and image proxy

Themes

Fonts

Layout

Typography

Image proxy

And some more…

Mobile web interface

Group by feed

Subscribing to YouTube feeds

FeedMe Android app

Filters and smart streams

One-click add to Pocket, “Mark all as read” date ranges and more

Ur/Web and BazQux Reader

Subscriptions search

News+ (gReader) Android app available on Google Play

Public feeds, IFTTT, keyboard navigation, larger fonts

Today’s downtime

Drag and drop subscriptions reordering, translation and some more

Auto refresh, finally

Reeder, Press and ReadKit via Fever API

Infrastructure improvements and some more

Slow Feeds app

Scheduled Maintenance this Wednesday

Happy Birthday, BazQux!

Starred and tagged items

Feeddler Pro for iPhone

Android app from the author of gReader

Google Reader compatible API