Alertle Launched

Binny V A — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 18:22:43 +0000

I am one of the geeks behind Alertle. Its a web based RSS Reader. I am responsible for a good amount of the JavaScript areas of this app

Features

Single Page Application: The entire application is contained in a single page – everything is done through Ajax. I will not advice that you make something like this(its a maintenance nightmare) but I can say one thing about it – its Cool. With a capital ‘C’.
Keyboard Shortcuts: I got the idea of creating a Keyboard Shortcut Library for JavaScript when I was working on this feature.
Autoplay: You can view articles as you are viewing a slideshow if you enable this.
Feedpacks: You can bunch a group of feeds together into a feedpack – and see all the posts from such a group together.
Sharing: You can share your feedpacks with other users

Perfect for High Volume Feeds

There is one major feature that sets Alertle appart from other RSS readers – it does not tell you if a post is read or not. Yeah, first you will think its a missing feature – but its not. I have used a lot of feed readers – once you subscribe to a couple of high volume feed – like say, BoingBoing or Slashdot or something, you can say goodbye to your sanity. It creates so many new items that the only way of staying away the mess is to click on the ‘Mark all as read’ button once every four seconds. You know what I mean – I am sure you have unsubscribed from many feeds for this reason.

With alertle, you can subscribe all these high volume feeds. And there is no pressure to view all the posts.

If you are an info junkie, I can guaranty that your will get lost for hours in Alertle.

Problems

IE is not Supported

We are still working on this – and due to deadline constraints, we decided to release Alertle without IE support. So if you are an IE user, I am sorry – but What in the World are you Doing? Ditch that terrible browser and get a real browser right now!

If we can get a few people to switch to firefox before we add support for IE, I will say that Alertle gone beyond and above the call of duty to make the web a better place!

Posts don’t have a Read Flag (pun unintended)

Um., yeah, I know – this is both an advantage and a disadvantage. This will prevent me from using Alertle for all my feeds. For my must-read feeds, I will still be using Google Reader. For the high volume stuff, I will use Alertle.

Getting to Know Alertle

So, what are you waiting for? Head over to Alertle and sign up for an account. Its FREE!

But if you are still unconvinced, here is a demo…

Google Reader has Search!

Binny V A — Thu, 06 Sep 2007 14:59:52 +0000

Finally – the feature I most wanted in Google Reader has been added. Its official people – Google Reader has search.

I have no idea why they took so long to add this feature – its ironic that Google fails to provide the search option.

Results Sorted by Date

The main complaint I have about the search feature is that the results are sorted by date and not by relevance. The below picture will make this very clear…

I would prefer that it is sorted by relevance – at least provide an option for that.

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