Teething Troubles!

Hi all,

Thanks to everyone who has downloaded the new version of the app - I've just had my first feedback today from qurgh on the FeedHammer web site:

http://www.feedhammer.co.uk/feed-item-details.php?id=9765

Qurgh raises some good issues (and thanks for contacting me directly!). I've done a quick fix of 2 of them and released a new version onto the Play Store - 3.0.2 (it should be available in the next few hours):

I've also now set up some software to track these, and future errors/enhancements as they crop up. You can view the issue that have already been raised here:

JIRA FeedHammer Issue Tracker

Just to cover each of Qurghs issues:

"App resets to the first screen when the phone is rotated"

• The latest version (3.0.2) should fix this

"why does the app need phone access permissions? I see no reason for an app of this nature to have permissions to be able to grab my phone number, check my phone call status or make calls as me"

• This was a mistake on my part - when I set up the permissions I added this by mistake (READ_PHONE_STATE) when I was adding READ_NETWORK_STATE (which is needed to check the connection).
• I have now removed this permission in 3.0.2

"There is no way to copy or share URLs"

• I'll look into this - I was going to add the 'Share it' links from the website - but they would just mean more stuff to download to the mobile device, which I wanted to avoid initially. I'll look into this more (and also some native Android share it options)

"App crashes randomly"

• I haven't seen this in my testing - but will test some more and monitor the crash alerts from Google to try and troubleshoot what the problem is

"Lots of lag when scrolling the feed lists"

• Again - I haven't noticed this yet (seems pretty quick on my testing). Is this on any connection (WIFI?) or just on 2G/3G connections? I'll see if I can replicate it

"Instead of using a built in browser, can you give us the option to use an external browser for web links and the youTube app for youTube links?"

• Any links using the buttons ('Read Full Article') - should open the external browser. I have noticed some issues where the articles themselves contain links - which if you click will open in the internal browser (which I guess is what you mean). This is a bit tricky as I might need to do some extra parsing of the HTML I pull down from the external feeds to add in some extra HTML - unless I can intercept these calls at a global level. I will look into it

I've added issues in the JIRA software for all of these issues - so I can track progress on them all:
JIRA FeedHammer Issue Tracker

If anyone has any more issues/requests/feedback - please let me know directly - either via email, the http://www.feedhammer.co.uk web site, or the Google group 




Thanks again for the feedback (and for making it directly to me) - it helps to make the product better! I hope to have more new releases very soon - watch this space!

Feedhammer - new Version! - with VIDEO!

Hi Folks,

Feedhammer is changing this weekend! The new version will be made live today sometime!

I've made a quick vid for the new version (see below):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoqHrQIYPMc

There may be a few teething troubles - so please bear with me if you experience any difficulties. I think it should work ok - but you never know - there are some major changes happening here.

My schedule for the weekend is:

1. Do a video of the new version
2. Write this blog post to let everyone know whats happening
3. Switch the DNS over for the back end (I have 2 servers running in parallel at the moment - I'm going to switch from the old to the new one today...)

When the switch is done - if you have the old app - it should still work, but the images will all show Feedhammer.

I'd urge you to upgrade as soon as you can - hopefully the video shows all the good stuff in the new version!

As I said - I expect some problems - if you do have a problem please let me know directly (and not via a bad review on the play store - pleeeease!!)

Hopefully this is just the start of the next phase for FeedHammer - much more coming in the New Year!!

Cheers,
Ade!

FeedHammer coming on iOS! Pictures!

Hi All,

Following on from my last update - all the key work on the back end server is pretty much complete now (at least for the first release). I've spent the last month or so looking at performance and caching of content to make the system as fast to use as possible.

I've then moved on to redevelop the client app.

I'm changing from a native Android app to use Abode's Phonegap (Apache Cordova). This uses HTML/Javascript under the covers. The main benefit of this is that it allows me to code the app once - and then deploy it on a range of different mobile devices (anything that saves me time is most definitely 'a good thing'!)

I've been developing the app on Android - and just tried a quick deploy on iOS to see how it looks - and it's looking great!

I'm still a few weeks of testing and tweaking away from a release - but thought I'd give you a preview of some of the up and coming new features!

Running on iPad - new 'Suggestions Screen'

If you look at the bottom of this page - we now suggest 3 other stories that have similar content to the one you're viewing. Click on any of these to view (and then see another 3 similar news items, and so on  - I've found it's a great way to browse around all the content we accumulate)

Endless Lists

At the bottom of the list of items - we now have a 'More' button. So once you reach the bottom - you don't have to stop - just load the next set of items, and keep going

Running on iPhone - new Category View

You can filter the news items by broad category. I hope to do more sophisticated filtering in future - but that's for a later release...

Search

Search across all news items - this, combined with the 'Suggestions' once you view an item is a great way to access all the content you are interested in

New Feed Sources View

You can now see a list of all the news feed sources we use for Feedhammer. We can add/remove any of these dynamically using our back end admin console. We are careful not to flood the app with too many sources for now - but will bring more online as we improve the personalisation and filtering options

Listen to Podcasts Directly

This is a great addition - for any podcast you can now play the content directly from the app. We may add a feature where you can keep playing and control the podcast while continuing to browse the app. 

Android Update

All these great new features will also be replicated in a new Android app too!

Watch this space - more updates to follow soon as we get closer to the switch over!

As ever - if you use and like the app - please, please give us a positive review in the Android store! 

It makes all the difference - and keeps me motivated!

FeedHammer 2013

Hi All,

Although it may look as though not a lot has been happening with FeedHammer for most of this year - don't be fooled. We've seen some huge changes behind the scenes - changes which should start to come into effect around the turn of the year..

What makes FeedHammer different to most of the other news readers out there is that we act as an aggregator of Warhammer news. We go out there and grab all the stuff we think is interesting and store it in our database - where we can store it, index it, examine it, and post process it before making it available to the mobile app and web site.

This lets us do some cool stuff which we've wanted to do for a while - but have been holding off doing before we are sure we have the back end systems in place that can handle it in the most efficient and scalable way. We want to build a sound, scalable base before tagging on more functionality to the app prematurely.

For the last year we've been running a full Java enterprise stack - which has worked exceptionally well - but requires a lot of complex components working together. During this period we've seen the growth and maturity of more 'cloud' based platforms - which can scale dynamically very easily. I've always felt like this is the direction I've wanted to go with this - and have spent a lot of time looking at PAAS solutions like Google App Engine and Cloud Foundry, but they've always *just* failed to hit my mark. Twice now I've done a lot of exploratory development work only to get so far and realise it's not going to do everything I want, and I've ended up returning to the current working solution. However - now I think I have the best solution for moving forward. To cut a long story short - I've basically rewritten the whole back end system using Spring - which I think will give most flexibility over the coming years as the various cloud platform offerings mature.

Initially I plan to run this on Amazons EC2 platform. This is the gold standard in this area and a good place to start - the new back end is up and running on there now and undergoing tests. A screen shot of the admin console is shown below:

This is running in parallel to the current live system (which is alive and well, and running on OpenStack).

If you think of whats going on behind the scenes in FeedHammer - there's actually quite a lot to consider and manage. For a start you need to be able to define which news sources you want to grab - and what type of news format they provide - RSS, Atom, Twitter, Web pages...

You also need to specify when you should update them - each one is different - hourly, daily, 3 hourly, etc.. And then you need to spread the load so it doesn't try and read them all at once. You need logging to keep an eye on whats happening to spot potential problems and troubleshoot existing ones...

All of this needs an administration console to manage - and I now have most of that in place - some screen shots are shown below (remember - this is just the back end, for my eyes only to try and keep things running smoothly):

Some of the new functions that are in place and getting lined up to go live include:

• Linked Items - because we store and index everything - if you view a story about, say Bloodletters on Bad Dice - we can suggest other Bloodletter stories from different sources at the same time (from completely different sources)
• Podcasts inline - we now extract and identify media content from news items, including Podcasts - and can provide a media player so you can stream the podcast directly (should you want to)
• Improved media image extraction - if as story has a thumbnail image - we now use that image in place of our default one for that source
• Improved scheduling and caching - now we have that in place we can add more content with more confidence. We've always been cautious in adding too much too quickly (though in part thats because we don't want to dilute the content - but that's another issue for the next major upgrade)
• Brand new Mobile Interface - we still need to iron out some of the bugs on this one - this is where our focus will be after we get the new back end live - we want to update our Android app and roll it out to Apple and MS devices too in the new year

If you've got this far - thanks for staying with me!

I just wanted to share what was going on -  and let you know that we're working *very* hard to get a solid, scalable and useful platform in place that will take us though 2013 and well beyond - and if you have any suggestions for features or improvements - please do get in touch! We should start to see the fruits of this years (sometimes frustrating) labours coming on line soon!

And - as ever - if you like the product - please do leave a positive review on the Play Store (of just get in touch another way) - that's what keeps me wasting me weekends hunched over a keyboard!

Latest Comments and Update!

Hi All,

Just wanted to reply to a couple of new comments on the Google Play Store for the Android App. I can't reply on the store itself - so hope the authors will read this (via Feedhammer!). I'd also like to give everyone a quick update on current developments.

First - to the last couple of comments:

Great app Great app. Any chance of a donate version to get rid of the adds

Firstly - thanks! And thanks for taking the time to give some feedback - very, very! much appreciated! As to a donate/no ad version -  I've been thinking about a few options in this area. Rather than just jump in and do another version with no ads for a fee - the approach I *think* I favour would be a no ad/extra feature version paid for on a yearly subscription basis. It would be optional - and a very, very small charge (pence) - but it would be interesting to look at that model - and just see how it works. It wouldn't come close to covering the hosting costs of this thing (at the moment - I'm building this to scale to a *lot* of data down the line) - but it would be an interesting exercise. That would be a bit further down the line though - and I'm planning some questionnaires and getting direct feedback before doing anything like that.. Hopefully by that point I'd have had more time to try do more advertising and build more of a community around the site - got loads of ideas, just not enough time (I want to build something that you guys feel is useful - pointless otherwise!)

Great app I love this app, it's my go to place for all things war hammer.

Awesome! Comments like that are why I'm sat on the floor now - typing this on a laptop balanced on an inflatable mattress at 11pm on a Friday night...

On that point - I've basically moved into a new *temporary* flat while working away. No internet access set up yet (tethering from a 3G connection at the moment). Working on 2 key strands at the moment - on the back end - I'm looking to migrate the whole infrastructure to Amazon EC2 (from Rackspace OpenStack) - that's running MySQL, Glassfish, Apache, Squid on Ubuntu servers. Trying to get it done before attending a training day in London with Amazon next week, but Glassfish isnt playing nice...

On the other strand - I really need to get an iPhone version available asap! I want to run some adverts - but really need an iPhone version available first. 

Android is a native app - and I initially looked at doing the same for iPhone. But Im changing tack and going the PhoneGap/Cordova route - which will allow me to write one app - and deploy it on Android/iPhone/Windows/Blackberry... It may mean one step backwards initially for the android version - but will make it much better down the line (I *hope*!)

Anyway - more of that to follow! Thanks again for your comments/reviews - if you use/like the app and haven't left a review yet - please, please do!

Click here to leave a review/comment!

Oh - and a shout-out to the guys at FoodHammer - just saw your mail - thanks for getting in touch! Unfortunately my web access and admin console is in a state of flux. Can't do much more than give you a tweet tonight guys - check them out - Michigans premiere WH40K charity event!!

FeedHammer: Logo of the Week

Our new logo was designed with the help of the 'British Design Experts' company - it grew from some initial concept designs - I chose the one I liked and then we 'chaosified' him a little. I wanted something that was clean, irreverent and simple, but didn't infringe on GW copyright in any way.

I was pretty happy with the result! - and I think the guys at the design studio were too - as we got voted their 'logo of the week' by the staff at the studio (see below).

As soon as I get some free time I might run a competition to name the little feller.... Free Mug to the best suggestion? Watch this space!

Death, and Rebirth of a Server!

We experienced a brief anomaly in the Immaterium yesterday - which had an adverse effect on our server availability for a few hours yesterday..

Apologies if anyone was adversely affected!

I host the back end stuff on Slicehost servers. They were acquired by Rackspace a while ago, and there has been a gradual move to migrate the servers to Rackspace OpenCloud.

Well, yesterday - while I was doing the day job, I clicked the button to migrate everything across to the new OpenStack platform...

Everything went smoothly - except for my Glassfish installation, which I just couldn't couldn't resurrect...

This meant that no data was available between about 11am and 7pm GMT.
In the end it came down to a reinstall, reconfigure and it all came back to life again

Always on a Friday....

Meanwhile - work progresses on the iPhone client!

As ever - if you like the product and have a moment to spare - a positive review is always welcome! I'll reply to the latest kind ones in a new update here shortly!
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.cor.news.feedhammer&feature=search_result#?t=W251bGwsMSwyLDEsImNvbS5jb3IubmV3cy5mZWVkaGFtbWVyIl0.