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.

The Challenge Ahead

You would have noticed that in the past few weeks we have updated our interface significantly so to improve the user experience on touch enabled devices, for different form factors. For those of you who are new to this platform, all these changes are for readers who come into our site, don't register and simply want to browse the news.

This quickly gets old, because as we have mentioned earlier, you end up seeing the same old articles if you visit us frequently enough. For such users, we want to remind you that, you can register with us and obtain a feed url which you can put inside Google Reader or many of the applications like Flipboard, Reeder, Pulse, etc. This is the better way to do it because the feed always shows unread articles, so you don't have to click through pages of read articles to see unread ones.

The real challenge for us now is to provide this experience to end users without their having to register with us. Any Tom, Dick or Harry should be able to just come to our site and be able to always read fresh articles without having to go through read content.

This is the next challenge for us, and we are preparing to solve this problem soon.

More updates to the site

I made more updates to the site basically to improve subtle problems in the news reader page and making it easier to read.

I have to mention, I watched the apple memorial for Steve Jobs in the apple campus on youtube.com and shed many tears today morning. It was very emotional and heart touching. Also, very inspiring to hear "The Crazy Ones" in Steve's voice. It gave real soul to that ad.

His life is such an inspiration, and makes me reach for the best I can do.