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<p>Hi readers, I want to take a moment to share what I’m working on for the month of April:</p>
<ul>
<li>The API: This is the biggest and baddest update since the River of News and premium accounts. The API includes some lightweight rewrites of how NewsBlur communicates to the back-end server. It’s going smoothly, and you can watch the progress on the less-than-aptly named branch <ahref="https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur/commits/dashboard_tweaks">dashboard_tweaks on GitHub</a>.</li>
</ul>
<p>The goal for the API is to have users build Android and iPhone apps on top of NewsBlur. Heck, even web apps which use NewsBlur data sound just fine. Whatever it is, I want to support it.</p>
<ul>
<li>Graphs on the Dashboard: I want to add some transparency to how the NewsBlur service is doing, both in terms of user growth and server status. I am adding a few graphs and numbers to the dashboard to show off how many premium and standard users have logged in during the past day, as well as how many feeds have been loaded, the response time for those feeds, and if there is a backlog for feed fetching.</li>
<li>Bug fixes: If you watch how often I’m committing to NewsBlur on GitHub, you may notice that a handful of bugs are fixed every single day. If you see a bug and it hasn’t been fixed, let me know on Twitter at <ahref="http://twitter.com/samuelclay">@samuelclay</a>, or email me at <ahref="mailto:samuel@ofbrooklyn.com">samuel@ofbrooklyn.com</a>.</li>
<li>Press page: Along with the API there will be a press page to showcase the nearly 40 articles and reviews written about NewsBlur. This page will also have a press kit, since one of the easiest ways to get reviewed is to have a number of materials at the ready.</li>
<li>Publisher information: If you’re a publisher and you want to make sure the NewsBlur experience is tip-top for your readers, this new page will highlight how to make the Original view work best.</li>
</ul>
<p>The work is progressing and it won’t be long now until everything above is ready for you to use and enjoy. There are a few other features that may make it out if I find myself working through everything else quickly enough.</p>
<p>I recently launched a feature to show an aggregation of the intelligence classifiers that users are using on their sites. Soon, this data may come back to implicitly recommend stories for you. But in order for there to be enough data to make recommendations useful, more users needs to classify stories they like and dislike.</p>
<p>The chart below shows the growth of different intelligence classifiers. The trend is up for tags, authors, feeds, and titles. That’s very good news.</p>
<p>If you’re not using intelligence classifiers, you’re only getting half the value out of NewsBlur.</p>
<p>Intelligence classifiers are the phrases, tags, and authors that you like and dislike. Training your sites by choosing classifiers for each feed will automatically highlight the stories you want to read and hide the stories you don’t want to see.</p>
<h2id="whats-happening-under-the-hood">What’s happening under the hood</h2>
<p>To get a better picture of how stories are being classified into the red, yellow, and green states, we need to take a look at how NewsBlur is using your intelligence classifiers and applying them to stories.</p>
<p>When you select a tag, author, or phrase, NewsBlur looks for an exact match in all other stories in the same feed. It’s a very simple match, and nothing mysterious is happening without you being explicit about what you want to see.</p>
<p>Green always wins. If you have 2 green classifiers and 3 red classifiers on a single story, the story will show up green, since it’s clear there is at least *something* you like about the story.</p>
<p>However, classifying the publisher (i.e. the feed itself) works slightly differently. If you specify that you like or dislike the feed, all stories are automatically classified according to this preference, unless there is a tag, author, or title phrase that is classified, in which case it wins over the feed’s classification.</p>
<p>This offers a neat trick to hide most stories from a feed, even in the yellow intelligence state, except for the few stories that you want to watch. Simply train the feed to dislike the feed itself, but give a thumbs up to the tags/authors/phrases in the stories you want to read. This will result in all stories being either red or green, which keeps the site out of your yellow intelligence setting.</p>
<h2id="whats-in-store-for-the-future">What’s in store for the future</h2>
<p>Right now the intelligence classifiers are pretty naive. But the impetus for building NewsBlur was to passively train your feeds, just based on your implicit preferences. There’s a lot of work to be done to make this happen, and you can follow NewsBlur’s progress over on GitHub at <ahref="http://github.com/samuelclay">http://github.com/samuelclay</a>.</p>
<p>We’ve come a long way, readers. What started as a fun project to scratch an itch has become a fun project that pays for its ever-increasing self. This week I’m going to show how motivated I am about turning NewsBlur into a serious blog reader. And it starts with a collection of a circles:</p>
<p>What may take you, somebody who has done more than only crop images in an image editor, only a few minutes took me on the order of 1-2 hours a day over 5 days. It’s always like this. Slow as sin until you start to pick up how the editor wants you to work. Then it’s gravy. I could, in fact, completely redo the logo in 10 minutes on a blank canvas. That’s how it goes.</p>
<p>The biggest difference is not the new logo, which sits comfortably underneath your sites when reading, but the new favicon.</p>
<p>This little guy sits there, staring at you the whole time, and reminding you where you are. He had to be created separately, but once you know what the hell a mask is, resizing and showing exaggerated pixels is child’s play.</p>
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<p>NewsBlur is a personal news reader that brings people together to talk about the world.<br/>
