Archive for Rojo tag

Google Reader – contender for the online aggregator throne?

October 2006 – August 2007 • Internet (, , ) • 1,088 views • 2 responses

Screenshot of Google ReaderI wrote a while back about how Rojo’s upgrade was a disaster and that it had led me to look for alternatives.

Bloglines didn’t have the same feeling of a polished interface that Rojo has tempted me with but unlike Rojo but it has been happily consuming the feeds of all my sites and presenting them without fuss or issue since I started using it a few weeks ago.

I got back from London this weekend and found that Google has finally upgraded the user interface for their online reader offering to something on-par with some of the others (at last!)

Apart from looking like Google Mail it also has a great feature whereby as you scroll down items it highlights the current one and if you scroll past it then it assumes it has been read.

This is great compared to the “I’ve read everything in this group” button of Rojo and Bloglines “Well you clicked group X that had 100 posts so I’m assuming it’s read”.

Another cool feature seems to be the response time at which Google Reader picks up articles. It even picked up this article within 3 minutes on my little blog.

Of course the best part of all this is thanks to the guys behind OPML moving from one reader to another is just a case of exporting from one and importing to another – even groups are preserved.

[)amien

Rojo – how not to publish updates to your site

September 2006 – March 2008 • Internet () • 1,198 views • 2 responses

Rojo has been my favourite on-line reader for a while despite the annoyances and quirks but this weekends ‘upgrade’ got me wondering how incompetent the team behind it is and what exactly Six Apart have purchased.

There were a couple of problems before the upgrade – the one most users would have seen is the crazy unread counts which are almost always wrong – but you can learn to live with that.

The second problem was Rojo failing to pull feeds in – if you drill down and there’s nothing to read you are given the “This feed is failing” message which tells you zip about what they think is wrong.

In the case of DamienG.com’s RSS feed I was told by their support staff this was because they couldn’t connect to my server. GrinGod created a feed to my site’s Atom feed that *was* still updating so that excuse was shot down quite quickly.

It’s not just me either – major big blogs such as blogs.msdn.com would sit for hours with the same message before springing back into life.

Then came this weekends upgrade.

I have some experience with publishing code to commercial sites. This is the sort of plan we use:

  1. Install and configure secondary set of servers
  2. Load software to be tested onto those servers
  3. Let internal testers loose on them
  4. Let trusted end users loose on them
  5. Run load testing software to ensure performance
  6. Repeat until it passes
  7. Schedule the switch with the appropriate teams
  8. Make an announcement
  9. Switch over to the new servers

But the team at Rojo went with a different approach. As far as I can tell here was theirs:

  1. Take current servers off-line with a notice
  2. Load software for 20 hours
  3. Bring servers back on-line

I certainly don’t see testing on that plan.

Even basic developer-level testing should have spotted that the lower “Mark Page Read” link is missing a javascript: prefix rendering it a useless link to a 404, the fact that the “Mark Feed Read” isn’t refreshing the page along with “Add Mojo” too.

“Show unread only” may as well read “Show nothing” as that’s what it’s doing.

These aren’t boundary conditions but primary use-case scenario’s that are failing.

To cap it all now every single feed has disappeared in the last half-hour.

It has been reported that Rojo have raised at least $3.5 million in venture capital so why their software development process looks like an inexperienced developer publishing from his laptop is anyone’s guess.

[)amien