Hi readers, I want to take a moment to share what I’m working on for the month of April:

  • 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 dashboard_tweaks on GitHub.

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. 

  • 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.
  • 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 @samuelclay, or email me at samuel@ofbrooklyn.com.
  • 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.
  • 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.

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.

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.

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.

I’m also happy to say that as NewsBlur continues to grow, and with a few hundred premium users, it is becoming quite a big network of readers.