Feed Sidebar 4.0 has been released for all users of any previous version of Feed Sidebar, and this version has two great improvements over version 3.1:

1. You can now sort your feeds by three different criteria:
   
2. Feeds are now updated constantly, rather than all at once. So if you have 60 feeds, and you have Feed Sidebar set to update once per hour, instead of updating all 60 feeds after an hour, Feed Sidebar will now update one feed every minute. This should fix any issues users have had with Firefox locking up while feeds are being update.

You can read more about these improvements in my previous blog posts: Feed Sidebar 3.2 Beta 3: A Gentler Feed Updater, Feed Sidebar 3.2 Beta Update, and Sort your feeds in Feed Sidebar.

To upgrade to version 4.0, you can install this update from Mozilla Add-ons, or if you already have have Feed Sidebar installed, it will be automatically downloaded for you.

TwitterBar 2.4 was released this morning, and the main change is that it now integrates the URL shortening service tweak.tk. The URLs that .tk generates are the shortest you can get, weighing in at 15 characters; TwitterBar's previous URL shortener, is.gd, generated 18-character URLs.

What does this mean? Well, now when you post a URL to Twitter with TwitterBar, you have 125 characters for your message instead of 122. So feel free to toss an extra LOL or BRB in there; you've got plenty of room.

I'm going to use this occasion to test Mahalo's new embeddable pages:

Wolfram|Alpha, the new computational knowledge engine, seems like it has a lot of potential. But for some reason, I'm not so sure about its mathematical abilities:

For more information on Wolfram Alpha, here's Mahalo's Wolfram Alpha page:

I was thinking it would be neat to add a recommendations component to Feed Sidebar. It would work like this:

1. You'd opt in to share your list of feeds anonymously.
2. Your list of feeds is sent to a central server.
3. Other users do the same thing.
4. Magic happens.
5. The Feed Sidebar would occasionally recommend a new feed based on what other people like you are reading.

Would anyone besides me use this? I know that other Web-based feed readers have similar features, but those of us who control our own data are getting left out in the cold.

I am going to be abandoning development of the Yammer Time extension for Firefox. I no longer have the time or motivation to maintain it.

Is there anyone out there is interested in taking ownership of it? If so, e-mail me at cfinke@gmail.com, or leave your contact info in the comments. It's fairly simple as extensions go, so even if you're just getting started with addon development, you shouldn't have any problems understanding the code.

Christina explained that it most likely passed through the dog. That would explain the missing string and glossy paint...

Posted via email from Christopher's posterous

I've been working on decreasing the CPU consumption of my Feed Sidebar Firefox extension; one of its main problems is that when it's time to update the feeds, Firefox can grind to a halt while the Sidebar starts to make tens or hundreds of HTTP requests.

A solution I've settled on allows the sidebar to slowly work through your feeds list, spreading out the updates over the interval you've set (e.g., update every hour), so that there's never one big update. For example, if you have 50 feeds, and you have set Feed Sidebar to update them every hour, it will now update a single feed every 72 seconds (60 minutes / 50 feeds = 72 seconds per feed), rather than updating all 50 feeds at the same time every 60 minutes. However, in order to keep the sidebar working as it previously did where all of your feeds would update as soon as you started up Firefox, the sidebar will still do one initial update, leaving only a second between each feed update.

You can install this beta version right here if you want to take advantage of the new update mechanism. Some changes that you'll notice:

• The statusbar no longer shows text like "Next update: 4:32 PM". This is because your feeds are always being updated.
• As each feed is updated, text will appear in the status bar like so: "Updating 1 of 50 (Joe Smith's Blog)..." You can click on this text to visit the site of the feed that is being refreshed.
• If you click "Mark All as Read", it won't affect any feeds that were refreshed less than 3 seconds ago. This is to avoid accidentally marking things as read before you realized they were there.
• There is now an option to disable automatic updates completely.
• You can still quickly update all of your feeds at any time by clicking the Reload button in the sidebar.
• The pop-up notifications that used to appear after a full update ("100 new feed items") are now specific to each feed. The title is the name of the feed, the image is the website's shortcut icon, and it will either say "2 new items" (or 3 or 4...), or if there's only one new item, the title of that item will appear in the notification box.

I'd appreciate any and all feedback (comment on this post, email cfinke@gmail.com, or ping me on Twitter) so that when I release this to the general Feed Sidebar public, I'm not inundated with e-mails saying "Why didn't you do it this way?" (Again, you can install the new version here.)