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Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

blog.newsblur.com

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Re: Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

#121

Post by ergo14 »

conesus wrote: post #8

And I just want to remind the technical crowd here that NewsBlur is 100% open-source: http://github.com/samuelclay I've been asked quite a few times why I open-source the code. The answer is simple. Let me use an example from Joel Spolsky. (From http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html ) The dominant spreadsheet, with 100% market share, is Lotus 123. You're the product manager for Microsoft Excel. As…

Hello Samuel,

I'm sure you will need all the help you can get with upcoming traffic so I've tried contacting you recently about helping you scale better with https://errormator.com, but I somehow miss you when you are online on IRC, so I've sent you mail to the mailbox i've found.

Its great since your app is python based and we maintain an awesome python client.

Drop me a line if you are interested, we love open-source at Errormator so you would get a completly free plan for non-profits :-)

I could also help you personally if you have any integration questions, you can find me on #errormator on Freenode IRC server.

Re: Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

#122

Post by [deleted] »

jscn wrote: post #70
conesus wrote: post #8

And I just want to remind the technical crowd here that NewsBlur is 100% open-source: http://github.com/samuelclay I've been asked quite a few times why I open-source the code. The answer is simple. Let me use an example from Joel Spolsky. (From http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html ) The dominant spreadsheet, with 100% market share, is Lotus 123. You're the product manager for Microsoft Excel. As…

Just wanted to say, NewsBlur and Pinboard are both big inspirations for me. It's awesome to see people making money off of open source software.

[deleted]

Re: Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

#123

Post by tehwalrus »

well done with keeping this app running! I switched from Reader as soon as I noticed, and I've been reading my feeds through NewsBlur the last couple of days with no problems (after an initial setup delay)!

I have a couple of comments on how the UI works, but I'll consider those as time goes by and send you more specific feedback then (mostly I'm annoyed by things that work differently to google reader, so I'll hang back and see if they convince me...)

Re: Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

#124

Post by VLM »

laureny wrote: post #99
conesus wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is something I'll be working on soon enough. There are many, many dependencies (not only for the web app, but there are three DBs that you have to have installed as prerequisites - mongo, postgres/mysql, and redis). The real problem with setting up your own instance of NewsBlur is that you'll have to do your own feed fetching. This is effectively what you're paying for when you pay for NewsBlur. Let me break it…

> So you have to run 10 processes in parallel, and that's already beyond the capabilities of most single machines. Er... really? My laptop is three years old and I run 150 threads on it every time I launch the server I'm working on (dozens of times a day). No problems at all. It's in Java, in case it matters.

There's an old saying that the true definition of supercomputing merely means moving the bottleneck from the CPU to the IO subsystem. The modern "big data" world seems about the same way. On a regular basis I find strange new ways at work to saturate any I/O system I get access to... Give me a faster I/O system, I'll find an exciting new way to bring it to its knees.

Re: Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

#125

Post by dpcx »

sergiosgc wrote: post #119
rssident wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should make an intelligent feed updating algorithm. If you have at least fifty previous entries from a feed it's easy to predict fairly accurately when that feed will need to be updated again. That's how the indexer for http://rssident.com works. Saves you tons of cpu cycles.

Most blog providers support pubsubhubbub(the worst protocol name ever). It allows you to avoid polling, by having the content producer notify you of feed updates.

Except that, even with PSHB, you get polling. I wrote about it here http://www.dp.cx/blog/pubsubhubbub-and-polling.html#.UUcPWLp...

Re: Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

#126

Post by dpcx »

ergo14 wrote: post #121
conesus wrote: post #8

And I just want to remind the technical crowd here that NewsBlur is 100% open-source: http://github.com/samuelclay I've been asked quite a few times why I open-source the code. The answer is simple. Let me use an example from Joel Spolsky. (From http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000052.html ) The dominant spreadsheet, with 100% market share, is Lotus 123. You're the product manager for Microsoft Excel. As…

Hello Samuel, I'm sure you will need all the help you can get with upcoming traffic so I've tried contacting you recently about helping you scale better with https://errormator.com , but I somehow miss you when you are online on IRC, so I've sent you mail to the mailbox i've found. Its great since your app is python based and we maintain an awesome python client. Drop me a line if you are interested, we love open-sou…

How does this compare to [1]?

[1]: https://github.com/errbit/errbit

Re: Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

#127

Post by VLM »

tempestn wrote: post #107

A tad off topic, but I'm hoping the fastest way to get an answer: How does one move or delete multiple feeds at once in newsblur? There must be a way to do this, right? Say I import 100 feeds from an OPML file, then realize I actually want them all in a folder. At the moment the only way I can figure out how to do that is to click on each feed, click move to folder, click the folder dropdown box, click the folder I w…

I had a nearly identical experience. I took it as a spring cleaning moment and deleted about 10 basically dead or no longer interesting feeds. So it took about 2 hours, but most of it was mental processing, reviewing recent posts (if any) and thinking about each feed for about a minute. UI improvements would be cool, but spring cleaning still would have burned about 2 hours anyway.

Re: Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

#128

Post by ergo14 »

dpcx wrote: post #126
ergo14 wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello Samuel, I'm sure you will need all the help you can get with upcoming traffic so I've tried contacting you recently about helping you scale better with https://errormator.com , but I somehow miss you when you are online on IRC, so I've sent you mail to the mailbox i've found. Its great since your app is python based and we maintain an awesome python client. Drop me a line if you are interested, we love open-sou…

How does this compare to [1]? [1]: https://github.com/errbit/errbit

Hey, you could use airbrake/errbit compatible client to stream errors to errormator by changing the endpoint, but it is 30% of what errormator provides (just exceptions), we aim to be a lot more than that.

Please see this inteview with us that was posted recently, the article is in polish but the screenshots should give you a better overview of what errormator can do:

http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=pl&tl=en&js...

In short:

- exception monitoring

- performance metrics

- slow request and slow call aggregation

- log aggregation

We def. need a new index page and a features page to show all the functionality in a nice way.

Re: Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

#129

Post by MatthewPhillips »

boyter wrote: post #82
MatthewPhillips wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. If one were wise, you could stalk Google/Yahoo/BigCo properties that are being neglected, launch a paid competitor and reap the reward when they shut down. Pinboard and now Newsblur.

Thats actually a really good idea. I wonder what would be next? Most of Yahoo's properties seem be be neglected at the moment, but what about Google? Google News perhaps?

Probably Google Alerts. It's rather niche but people who use it absolutely rely on it. But the VC-funded Mention seems poised to take that one.

Re: Three Months to Scale NewsBlur

#130

Post by mikeash »

recuter wrote: post #3

I'd just like to point out that '$24/yr * high four-figures of paying costumers' with only one employee ensures NewsBlur will be around for a long time. :) This is the kind of single founder "life style" startup that VC's would paw-paw that is Doing It Right that many of us aspire to. The other ones I can think of are Pinboard and Instapaper. I'd rather go this route, personally, here's to more like these. Cheers.

It does make the truck number rather low. This is still probably less of a risk than trusting Google to keep a marginal product around (as recent events demonstrate), but there are different risks for small organizations that big ones don't share.
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