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.

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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.