Service Un-interrupted
As I write this, Google Reader is still available but its lifetime is measured in hours.
For the last 3 days, I have been using mo.lecul.es via Reeder on my iPhone, using the Fever API option, and the web app that I started building on Friday on everything else!
It is my intention to launch mo.lecul.es as a paid service in the next week or two. I had hoped to be finished with it before Google closed the shutters on Reader, but life got in the way a little.
The system is functional, but it is still a long way from properly usable. Some things that still need to be done:
- Add a way to subscribe to feeds without having to log into the database and manually type in SQL!
- Add a way to un-subscribe, move feeds into groups and rename them.
- Add a ‘logout’ button
- Add a way to change your password
- Create a signup page
- Integrate with a payment processor
- Make a nice landing page with tour screenshots
- Implement the Google Reader API
- Miscellaneous design/layout tweaks
So just a few things there. Longer term, the web app I built is awesome, I’m really pleased with it but I build things old school - no fancy javascript frameworks until everything works ‘sans-script’! (actually, no fancy frameworks at all, I like to build things myself). That means there are a lot of page refreshes - mark an item read; reload the whole page, switch feed; reload the page. This works great all the time it is just me, but I can’t see it scaling particularly well!
I realise too that the payment processor part is going to take a little while, but I’m giving myself a little extra time on that one - all accounts will start off free for the first month. I think paying for software is really important, but I also like to take things for a test drive before I plunk down cash. I guess the clock starts ticking on that one the moment I get my first customer!
Tasks for today are numbers 1, 2 and 3 on the list.