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Changelog 2018.2

We’re already in the second quarter of 2018, and a lot has happened here in the Feeder office. I thought I’d summarise what we’ve been up to since the last Changelog.

Besides the larger announcements that can be found in our blog, we’re always working on smaller tweaks, improvements, bug fixes and everything in between. These last couple of months have however been marked by some unplanned events like illnesses.

Also with Digg Reader shutting down, we have refocused some efforts to make Feeder a warm and comfortable home for those looking for a new stable RSS feed reader. We’re excited to announce some major releases for that soon. Stay tuned!

Our trusty tech team (me, Erik) has also spent some time migrating and upgrading our servers. For the first time ever Feeder’s main MySQL server has a read replica. It means that an outage of one the main database can quickly be resolved by promoting the read replica to primary. Also improved performance. In summary: Good stuff!

Below you’ll a non-exhaustive list of closed issues.

  • (Android) Release 2.2.6 fixing a couple of common crashes
  • (Web/extension) Added some more keyboard shortcuts, F to toggle simple/full mode, S to star, R to toggle Read
  • (Extension) Fix a couple of bugs with the 7.3-release in Safari
  • (Settings) Improve how feeds and folders are dragged and dropped. This should eliminate a couple of bugs people have been seeing while organizing their feeds
  • (Settings) Fix a bug where moving folders above/below other folders would not work
  • (Settings) Add an option to move many feeds/folders to folder at once
  • (Settings) Add a setting to enable HTTPS on the /reader page. The reason we have yet to add this because it can break the reading experience for sites that have not yet enabled HTTPS. We’re looking into ways to fix this, since naturally we want to enable HTTPS everywhere. Please note that all API, passwords, payment information, etc, is always sent over HTTPS.
  • (Settings) Fixed some caching issues using service workers, that could make it look like you were logged into two accounts at the same time
  • (Behind-the-scenes) Rewrite post and feed list in web and extensions to use React. This will pave the way for faster and more bug free development
  • (Behind-the-scenes) A server was was leaking HTTP connections due to some bad timeout values, debugged and fixed that
  • (Behind-the-scenes) Found that loading one’s feeds was really slow with many feeds, found a series of simple fixed that reduced the time from 10 seconds to 1 second
  • (Behind-the-scenes) Upgrade to Rails 5.2 and make pull requests to a couple of repositories not yet prepared for 5.2
  • (Behind-the-scenes) Fix an extremely obscure bug where our crawler couldn’t access servers with improperly setup IPv6 support
  • (Behind-the-scenes) Spent some time looking into moving away from Phusion Passenger’s Docker images, and instead use Puma with Nginx ingress containers. Was a bit harder than I thought so paused that project
  • (Behind-the-scenes) Reduced the size of our main Docker image by 100 MB by removing assets and rubygems cache files
  • (Web) Speed up initial page load on the /reader and /dashboard views

If you ever run into any bugs, have any ideas for improvements, we’re always listening at support@feeder.co