I am one of the geeks behind Alertle. Its a web based RSS Reader. I am responsible for a good amount of the JavaScript areas of this app 🙂
Features
- Single Page Application
- The entire application is contained in a single page – everything is done through Ajax. I will not advice that you make something like this(its a maintenance nightmare) but I can say one thing about it – its Cool. With a capital ‘C’.
- Keyboard Shortcuts
- I got the idea of creating a Keyboard Shortcut Library for JavaScript when I was working on this feature.
- Autoplay
- You can view articles as you are viewing a slideshow if you enable this.
- Feedpacks
- You can bunch a group of feeds together into a feedpack – and see all the posts from such a group together.
- Sharing
- You can share your feedpacks with other users
Perfect for High Volume Feeds
There is one major feature that sets Alertle appart from other RSS readers – it does not tell you if a post is read or not. Yeah, first you will think its a missing feature – but its not. I have used a lot of feed readers – once you subscribe to a couple of high volume feed – like say, BoingBoing or Slashdot or something, you can say goodbye to your sanity. It creates so many new items that the only way of staying away the mess is to click on the ‘Mark all as read’ button once every four seconds. You know what I mean – I am sure you have unsubscribed from many feeds for this reason.
With alertle, you can subscribe all these high volume feeds. And there is no pressure to view all the posts.
If you are an info junkie, I can guaranty that your will get lost for hours in Alertle.
Problems
IE is not Supported
We are still working on this – and due to deadline constraints, we decided to release Alertle without IE support. So if you are an IE user, I am sorry – but What in the World are you Doing? Ditch that terrible browser and get a real browser right now!
If we can get a few people to switch to firefox before we add support for IE, I will say that Alertle gone beyond and above the call of duty to make the web a better place! 😉
Posts don’t have a Read Flag (pun unintended)
Um., yeah, I know – this is both an advantage and a disadvantage. This will prevent me from using Alertle for all my feeds. For my must-read feeds, I will still be using Google Reader. For the high volume stuff, I will use Alertle.
Getting to Know Alertle
So, what are you waiting for? Head over to Alertle and sign up for an account. Its FREE!
But if you are still unconvinced, here is a demo…
This looks promising, but a couple of things here:
You will be much criticized for not having IE support. Despite being a poor ‘browser’, the world still clings on to it, and restricting to Firefox/Safari etc. means that you are losing a big audience. However, seeing AJAX, I know it would be a nightmare to incorporate IE support,but hey, that’s not the worry of a user. (I myself suffer ceaselessly – my blog’s design is flawless in both FF and opera, but skewed in IE).
2, when you yourself endorse google reader for must-read posts, what kind of impression does it make on someone who reads this?
Anyway, I’m gonna try it – Google reader is too dull, and my offline reader can’t be used when away from home.
> You will be much criticized for not having IE support.
That’s true – anyway, we are working on it.
> when you yourself endorse google reader for must-read posts
Well, I use GReader and Alertle for very different purposes. I use Google Reader to read a few feeds. But my use for Alertle is entirely different – Alertle is kind of an alternate interface for the web to me. A different way to browse the web.
Interesting stuff. I like that I don’t need to subscribe/ customize to my feeds, this allows me to just use it to browse random unknown stuff for inspiration.
Some feedback:
– the sign-up was quick and easy but it should ideally be one form combining the two steps, and in the center of the page, IMO (it is easily getting lost in the top right — small Ajax changes often go by unnoticed — and the form labels were also too far apart from the box)
– not sure if the right hand reading pane always has enough space, it caused some problems with e.g. Valleywag when the post contained a pic to the side (though I’m definitely for restricting line lengths for readability)
– the navigation pane on top is cutting blog titles too short; I see the need for restricting the length but blog titles like “Bloggin..” or “The Wea..” are almost impossible to make sense of (even with the nice icons, which, by the way, might look nicer using some ultracool vector-based upscaling a la vectormagic)
– when I clicked “customize” I wanted to cancel that and go back to the homepage, but clicking on the Alertle logo didn’t work
good luck!
@Philipp Lenssen
Thanks for all your suggestions – I am putting your comment on our Internal wiki.
Good to learn about the launch.
Let me check it out..
Well great start up, but as Sumesh said IE support is required. Although its not the best of browsers, it still have around 60-70 % market share.
Congrats on your new venture!
I heard of Alertle a week ago, if I remember correctly, but didn’t know that you were behind it.
It might be for geeks, but it’s going to find a place soon in my heart. I’d love to use it as a reader for some specific feeds I track – like, for instance, for keyword tracking, etc.
Good luck! Hoping to see it get better.
Well, its good that this site isn’t asking for many personal information. But still I feel that its always good to keep an option of deleting account. I couldn’t find that option in this site. I hated it when facebook didnt let me “delete” my account. They only deactivated it. Well there, they had lot of personal information, so it was serious issue.
Apart from that while making login, it was a bit unclear as in where to type email id. May be you should ask for email id and password in one go, rather than 2 times. This way the thickness of the form will increase and hence it should be easier to find register form.
Thanks for the comments on the app everybody. Your suggestions are going into our internal wiki.
I signed up and dig it, but somehow I either mis-remembered my password or (gasp!) there was a bug that caused it not to be recognized. I had the password reset, and that worked fine, but I would really like to change back it to something I can remember. I see no way to do that on the Alertle site (nor any place to ask how to do it, hence this rude butting in here). Is it possible?
http://www.alertle.com seems down 🙁
I am really interested in using Alertle. Is the company still alive ? Hope so.