Category: Work

On Wednesday, we released the Bloglines Top 1000, a ranking of what feeds are most popular with Blogliners. It’s a bit of a narrow ranking, as it only takes into account people who use Bloglines, but it’s a fun thing nonetheless.

One dirty little secret is that the ranking actually extends far past the top 1K. For instance, I’m ranked #53278, just ahead of Ray Ozzie (as of right now).

If you want to figure out where your feed is ranked, here’s a little trick, assuming you are logged into the beta and are subscribed to your own feed. First, open up the Bloglines console by hitting the ~ key, then paste in the following command:

window.location.href="/b/preview?siteid=" + bl.app.User.feeds.find("your feed name")[0].siteId;

“your feed name” is case sensitive and corresponds to the name you see in the feed tree. That command will take you to the preview page for your feed where you can see your feed’s ranking. After that, getting to the correct page on the top1K is pretty simple. Just take your ranking, divide it by 100, truncate the remainder, and add 1. So for me and my stellar 53278: 53278 / 100 = 532.78, drop the .78 to 532 and + 1 = 533. Yay for simple paging math.

So go check it out. See where you’re ranked. :)

Ever since twitter released their tracking feature, we’ve been watching for mentions of Bloglines. I’ve noticed a couple things:

1. People are really surprised and usually quite happy when they twitter about Bloglines and get a response from an engineer. I love surprising people. :)
2. Lots of folks are twittering about Bloglines in languages other than English. Which really isn’t surprising given how many of our users are from outside the US.

We’re watching… Keep on twittering!

I took all of my mods to the Bloglines beta and made them available on userstyles.org. Happy hacking!

One problem I have with some feeds, especially photoblogs and comics, is images that are too wide for the new beta interface. I’m a bit odd (I think) in that I like to run with my browser window less than full screen (I have a 1440 x 900 and a 1920 x 1200 screen). I’m generally running with Firefox or Camino at about 800 or 900px wide, which has a number of benefits. It reduces the line size for sites with fluid layouts, making things easier to read, and it allows me to have a couple browsers open side by side by side across the two screens. With this setup, I have about 620px left for article content.

The problem is some feeds have images in them that are quite a bit wider than 620px. To solve this, I use the following bit of CSS with Stylish to fix things up:

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document url-prefix("http://beta.bloglines.com/b/view") {
.templateText img {
  max-width: 100% !important;
}
}

Here’s a bit of CSS for stylish to make the Bloglines beta look a bit more like wordpress. Serif fonts FTW:

@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);

@-moz-document url-prefix("http://beta.bloglines.com/b/view") {

.fullviewTemplate .templateText {
  font-size: 100% !important;
  font-family: Georgia !important;
  max-width: 40em !important;
}

.fullviewTemplate .bl_title {
  font-size: 200% !important;
  font-family: Georgia !important;
  padding-top: 20px !important;
}

.fullviewTemplate .bl_datetime {
  position: absolute !important;
  top: 0px !important;
  left: 0px !important;
  text-align: left !important;
}

}