Significant updates rolling out today....

I am rolling out updates which improve the speed of anyone using our RSS feed after registering and logging in with us.

Also - when you login, on your personal news web page, the user interface is the same as the main site.    Just note that this page is updated whenever new news comes in, or you read these articles.

Be sure to register and try our RSS feed after a few hours.

We are the only site who keeps track of what you have read and always show you new articles only.

Why most Apple analysis is wrong...

I keep reading all these articles comparing Apple to Android and Windows Phone, and why the other platforms will eventually overtake Apple. I don't think that is going to happen, unless Apple itself screws up badly.

Why would you buy products from companies who always say the next iteration would be better, and whose products get obsolete in a few months time? - isn't that what is happening with Android today, and with Microsoft and Windows?

Why buy something like that, when Apple always delivers the best they can in a few product lines. You never regret buying a Mac or iPhone or iPad. You do regret when you buy a PC or Android phone.

Can you hear me - all those people who got the Droid X last year? - anyone hear about that anymore?. I still have and love my iPhone 4. It is the perfect phone. The hardware updates in iPhone 4S, I can wait till iPhone 5.

Many people say that Apple lost to Microsoft because MS licensed windows to other companies who priced it below the Macs. This is actually not true.

Apple lost the last time, because they stood still fighting within themselves, refusing to partner with others, and not innovating. They stood still, while others were able to improve their crappy operating systems over time. And they still don't have good developer tools like Visual Studio for the Mac.

Microsoft is just a good developer company who wrote a crappy OS because nobody else would do it properly. They had to be able to run these PC programs on some operating system right?

Microsoft may have won, but even Windows 7 or Windows 8 is not anywhere as good as any of the Apple operating systems. So, I don't think they ever "caught up". I can't say they caught up when my first model mac book air can handle multiple email accounts better than a 2011 Core i5 Windows laptop with 8GB RAM.

I can't say MS caught up when their crappy OS runs the hardware so bad, the disk wears down in a fraction of the time, while my macbook hard disk remains fine, without losing my data for years.

We are in 2012 people.

They could not even get the laptop sleep and wake to work properly, or stop the trackpad to behave weirdly, or VPN to crash after coming out of sleep, or make Outlook faster...

Every version of Android, I just go check the email client, keyboard and the browser, get disgusted and walk away. I have tried every Android device from phone to tablet, got frustrated and walked off.

Lots of updates recently...

A lot of changes have happened recently. As you know we made the home page more like a true metro style app with the article links directly on it. Also, the breaking news page was modified yesterday night to make it more usable and readable for everyone.

Speed has considerably improved by moving most of the infrastructure to Windows Azure. Also, we are using the azure cache to drive the articles to the site, thereby reducing the database hits by the application. This has significantly improved the application performance.

Article ranking has been improved because we consider article clicks from our twitter links as well now. So, if someone likes an article, it will improve its ranking.

There was some problem with the azure caching code which made it slow, so I have fixed that because I know lots of users are going back because the site is slow. I want it to be very fast and I have realized, that it will happen only if I cache properly.

Introducing a new feature which no other news site on the Internet has today

todayamerican.com was created to realize this idea. That when you read the news, you can choose not to see the news which you have already read and see only the fresh news, so you always have something new to read.

Along the way, I implemented this the classical way using RSS and user registration/ login, scoured the internet for new articles, ranked them, made sure you get only the most interesting articles, all the while forgetting that I created this site to solve this basic issue with any news site that, you always end up seeing pages of the same stuff you just finished reading an hour or a day before.

Finally, after trying out hundreds of ideas, I think I have got it now. If you go to any of our news pages today, you will see a link which lets you hide all the articles you have read so far. How this works is that, when you normally browse this site, you will be able to go back and forward and read the same articles in both directions.

But..

Should you choose to click on this link, it will make sure that the articles you have read are hidden, and from then on, you can still go forward and backward through the same articles, but any articles you read before you clicked this link will be hidden.

I will continue testing the site and making sure this works properly. I hope that users will like this feature, because I for one have always wanted to do this with a site.

Lots of changes have been made the past few days

It has been a busy week for todayamerican.com because I have been doing a lot of work on it in my free time. I wanted to first improve the performance so that ever the most demanding users can enter our pages in less than 10 seconds or 5 seconds as it used to before. Google says that users change their behavior even if there is a 250ms difference in a web page speed.

Not easy.

I had to go back and add caching everywhere to begin with, then once that was done, I had to go back and make sure that I cache a web page before you request it. So if you are on page 1, page 2 is cached and ready to be served by the time you request for it. Then I modified the Entity Framework to use inner joins instead of the way I was doing it earlier.

After all this was done, and the main site got faster, I have also reduced the size of the database, so we don't store more than a months worth of articles at any point of time, making it much faster to search it, whenever a user hits us.

The last change was to optimize the feeds page. If you register and login, we give you a url from which you will always get only fresh articles. This is done by tracking what is being downloaded. This was slowing down the RSS URL because of the database updates. This logic has now been made asynchronous so that, it loads faster.

More changes are coming. I am going to try and make sure that even if you don't login, our articles do not repeat when you browse it from any specific computer. That is what the original premise of todayamerican.com was always about - not to have to keep going through pages of articles already read. You can do that through the RSS feed right now, but I want to do it for the main site as well. This is so difficult to do, that is why no-one has done this before.

Please keep encouraging us by browsing our site. With customized pages for Mac, iPad and iPhone, we give you the best experience of reading tech news on any platform.

Remember, by the time you read the news on our site, it has been gathered from all over the internet, graded for being the most interesting, and we "digg" the article for you before hand.

New set of updates rolled out today

I have created a new web page specifically optimizing the breaking news page for ipad users. So, now, we have 3 different experiences for PC, mobile and tablet. The category news has not been updated for the ipad, but that will be up soon.

The home page has also been updated because a lot of people visit our archive. I have created this section because we cannot afford to store millions of articles in our database and serve that. We are like twitter, tech news changes fast, so we don't need to store more than a month or two of articles.

Stay tuned as we continue to update our site and provide a better experience.

Massive set of updates to our site today

We have completely refurbished our mobile experience today by creating specific mobile web pages which are optimized for Apple devices. Touch based, swipe enabled, it is more easier than ever to read tech news in a better manner. I hope everyone likes the new interface. The site works best with an iPad, but I still wanted the phone experience to be really better than anything else because so many of our readers use mobile phones.

So, I have kept it simple and made a single panel display which really shows the beauty of a good mobile site, and allows users to swipe left or right to move ahead or go back.

As Apple has noted, a lot of people may even use the mobile phone as the only way to access the internet, so we have hopefully done a good job here.

Improving the user experience on devices with larger screens

As many of you may know, we have strived to improve the user experience of our site from time to time as we get the oppurtunity. Today, we have added one more subtle but very important tweak to the UI. If you use any device like an iPad, Kindle Fire, Motorola XOOM or even a regular laptop, you can remain on the metro UI page as you go through various articles. This makes it very user friendly to use the site.

I am painfully aware more than anyone else about the stability and performance issues we have faced for sometime now. The database was killing us till the past few days. Now, we have moved almost all the major site backend duties to Windows Azure. Our database and app server are hosted there now.

It has essentially taken us 1-2 years to figure out the most cost effective way of hosting the site and the back end, so that minimal money is drained for day to day operations. We are nearly there now, slowly migrating from a home base operation to a more robust, scalable one.

One more important part needs to be in Azure, (the RSS feeds), and we will eventually move that as well into Azure. The important part to remember is that, the main site, the database and all the infrastructure needed to read the articles are now outside my home network, and so will never go down that easily.

As most of the users, simply go to the website directly, I am hoping that this will bring us more traffic as the days go by.