Bender Ádám

banksy,banksy,banksy...

Our user base recently grew 15x (and counting), and this changed everything. In a week we have gone from a personal project ran by three friends to a personal project ran by three friends with about 150,000 users.

Thank you everyone for your kind words, support, critique and active participation!

We are doing everything to bring things back to normal again, and we need your support.

We pay lots of attention to user requests, so we could not ignore the one where you had been asking for a way to donate us money.

We have been looking for a good way to accept donations, and we found Flattr. It is a simple way to manage your micro donations. You can either donate us fixed amount of money, or press the “flattr” button, and then your monthly budget would be distributed it among us and other projects you donated to during a month.

If you feel like donating a significant sum or you find flattr inconvenient, drop us a note (hello@theoldreader.com), we will figure something out.

If it’s a stretch, please don’t feel obligated to send us anything. We will use the money to expand our server infrastructure, which will help us to refresh feeds more often, process import queue more quickly, and even might even allow us to get more external resources to implement new features sooner.

Thank you everyone for your support. Every single contribution is an enormous help for us.

The Old Reader team.

(photo by rossomakha)

This looks like a fun toy. The Nanoblimp is a remote controlled blimp that uses regular party balloons filled with Helium, and to which you attach a set of propellers. There’s three of these, which used in combination allow for upwards/downwards, forwards/backwards and rotation movements. That should be enough to get you anywhere, even if you can’t move sideways. What blimp moves sideways anyway? There’s a set of ballasts that you also attach to the balloon to achieve neutral buoyancy and the remote control frequencies allow for up to 4 such airships in one room. That means battles and mayhem, which is the best way to spend a Friday afternoon in the office.

It’s $50 for one, which includes ten balloons, the propellers, ballast and remote control. The Helium, you have to find yourself.

[ Product Page ] VIA [ TheGreenHead ]

This is amazing. Incredible. Outstanding. And absolutely unexpected. We reached our personal milestone this morning. In early June Dmitry made a bet that he would start making an iOS app once The Old Reader hits 5000 registrations, and the team gladly accepted this challenge. We have not expected this to happen until early 2013 but in these last five days ~1900 new users registered. These are mostly some awesome people from Brazil who have found us and spread the word in Twitter with astonishing passion and lots of sincerity. 

We are sorry for some technical issues you might have experienced recently; importing your feeds should work much better now and we are trying various things to make it work perfectly. And thank you all for your patience, words can’t describe how important and touching it was to receive reassuring replies like “Ok, I can wait :)”.

So, 5000.

What does this mean for us?

The Old Reader is not even half-finished. We have lots of different tasks to do and the list is growing on a daily basis. All Dmitry talks about these days is different optimizations, while Anton silently opens terminal and starts typing, while Elena is trying to land us a sponsorship or a partnership. And, of course, we are looking forward to bookmarklet, mass-editing, sorting, and lots of other features you requested.

What does it mean for you?

The Old Reader is not even half-finished. But some day it will be.

What does it mean for all of us? 

As we promised earlier, along with other tasks we are going to start working on an iOS app. Yes, it’s a big deal for us.

Last month was not the best for our team in terms of our project: one of us changed jobs, some of us changed countries and all three of us are now unable to spend evenings and weekends coding, tweaking, fixing, writing emails, resolving issues, and generally having the best experience that friends can have: creating something together. But we will continue doing everything we can to bring The Old Reader to the new level.

We thank all our users for your interest, kind words, critique, suggestions, patience, and new challenges you give us. And thanks to our old and new friends for using The Old Reader to read, curate, and share the best content ever. Keep on going and we will keep on working. 

P.S. We knew that Elena can cry while reading emails and replies in Twitter, we witnessed her doing that multiple times during last few days, but apparently she is also able to write a post and cry at the same time. Hardcore multitasking.

Hello everyone!

This morning I have mixed feelings: I am happy that we have the possibility to bring our beloved The Old Reader to a new level, and I am sad that Google Reader soon will be completely over. It was a large part of my daily internet life. We even started making The Old Reader because no one could stand my whining anymore.

News came unexpected (mind you, we are living in GMT, so it was literally the middle of the night), but we are doing out best. We tripled our user base (and still counting), and our servers are not amused so far. We will be deploying more capacity shortly, so things should get better by the end of the day. Please, be patient with us.

(The Old Reader’s team before March 13, photo by repor.to/shuvayev)

This is overwhelming. When we started this as something for us and our friends to use, we never expected so many of you to join us in our journey. Thank you very much for your kind words and support, we appreciate this.

Seeing Google Reader go, many of you are asking whether The Old Reader is going to stick around. Also, quite a lot of people would like to donate to keep our project running. We have been discussing this quite a lot recently, and we decided that paid accounts (the freemium model) are the way to go. We want to keep making a great product for our users, not cater it for advertisers’ needs.

We are going to be honest, we have not even started coding this yet. However, we would like to get this news out as soon as possible for everyone to know the way we will be going. Paid accounts will have some additional features, but the basic free accounts will still be 100% usable. We are not in this game to make money, but we want to give something special back to the people who are going to be supporting us.

We have our daily jobs, so we can’t promise that new features will be ready tomorrow or next week. We have no investors or fancy business plans, but we are open about everything we do, and we want to do it the right way.

We reworked the plans according to the news today. Creating an API for mobile clients is the number one priority in our roadmap. We would love to collaborate with any developers who were making Google Reader clients. Please, spread the word about this if you can.

For those of you who are posting feedback and creating new feature requests - please, double-check for existing items in Uservoice. We hate answering the same questions multiple times and removing duplicate requests.

Most asked questions are:
- “When will OPML import be working again?” As soon as we launch more capacity to handle this. Hopefully, later today.
- “Why are you asking for access to my Google contacts when I log in via Google account?” We don’t anymore.
- “When will you make an iOS app? How about Android?” We will start with API as soon as we can and see how it goes.
- “Why is there no way to login without Google or Facebook accounts?” We cover that one in our knowledge base, but we plan to implement own login code. The demand is high.
- “How do I rename a feed?”. Just browse the Tour page, please? 
- “Shut up and take my money!”. Will work on that, stay tuned.

We have lots of things to do, and it will probably take us several days to reply to all emails and tickets. Also, Twitter keeps reminding us about daily tweet limits, so there might be delays as well.

Some other news: last week our developer (on the left) turned 21, and we have implemented PubSubHubbub support. Many of you asked us to make feed updates faster, and PubSubHubbub makes compatible feeds refresh almost instantly. Yay!

Thank you very much for your support. We will do our best during next three months to prepare for the day Google Reader will no longer be around.

slavin:

“What happens when you can’t find the City Hall’s Bible and you need to promote some firefighters to Battalion Chief and Fire Captain? If you’re the Atlantic City Fire Department of Atlantic City, New Jersey, you grab an iPad and load up your favorite Bible app to complete the swearing in ceremony.”

(iPad app replaces physical Bible in New Jersey swear-in ceremony | The Verge via Irwin)

heil to the early 00s – sexuality and digitality – I feel that it’s been just enough time now and soon we’ll see lots of stuff inspired by it.

Lena (left), sentenced for organizing a rape, and Katya, sentenced for theft. Juvenile prison for girls, Ukraine, 2009. © Michal Chelbin

Michal Chelbin‘s book Sailboats and Swans was recently released by Twin Palms Publishers. The images were made by the Israeli photographer in prisons throughout the Ukraine and Russia, and explore the idea of what it’s like to be locked up and constantly watched. Novelist A.M. Homes wrote the text for the book, an excerpt of which is below:

“The images are about a kind of discomfort–theirs, hers, mine and ours. It is like an old-fashioned staring contest–one guy looks at the other and the first one who blinks is the loser, except Michal Chelbin never blinks. Instead she captures with the click of a shutter. Chelbin is always looking, drawing what is hidden to the surface. She captures–we shudder.”

Young prisoners. Juvenile prison for boys, Russia, 2009. © Michal Chelbin

Hallway. Juvenile prison for girls, Ukraine, 2009. © Michal Chelbin

Sergey, sentenced for murder. Juvenile prison for boys, Russia, 2009. © Michal Chelbin

Vova (left), sentenced for theft, and Alexander (didn’t reveal his crime). Men’s prison, Ukraine, 2010. © Michal Chelbin

Ira, sentenced for theft. Women’s prison, Ukraine, 2009. © Michal Chelbin

Sailboats and swans. Juvenile prison for boys, Ukraine, 2010. © Michal Chelbin

Masha (left), sentenced for violence, and Sveta, sentenced for theft. Juvenile prison for girls, Ukraine, 2009. © Michal Chelbin

Vika, sentenced for murder. Prison for women with children, Ukraine, 2010. © Michal Chelbin

Welcome to Hell (tattoo). Men’s prison, Ukraine, 2008. © Michal Chelbin

reggeli...

"Gott ist tot!"

Minden tisztelet a kitartásukért, de bazz...

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Bicycle Taxidermy, the loving and lasting solution for your mechanical bereavement.

-Mi a jobb a paralimpiai aranynál?
-Járni..  

Nagyon úgy tűnik, hogy megvan az új törzskocsma, amit a Tandem bezárása óta keresünk.

Egy kis söröző a Belső-hétkerben, amit egy '80-as évekbeli autóbontóból rendeztek be, 290 egy korsó Borsodi, kaja nincs, mákpálinka viszont van, lepukkant alkeszek sincsenek, a közönség viszont kórusban énekel Máté Péterrel és simán be lehet férni péntek este 8-kor.

- A japánoknak kicsi a farka...
- Ja, kicsi és pixeles.

Szvíthóm.

Előre mondom, hogy szét lesztek baszva ha Szunyáról rosszat írtok! Autótún, giga (de úgy giga, nem a számítós) mutáló kölyökhang, szétrúgott, kopott fű, meg minden. Annyira jó!

Létezik!

.se

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Check out these 10 classic logos re-made for the zombie apocalypse!

[via neatorama]

Brit tudósok

Napjainkban egyre  közelítünk egy újabb,  veszélyesebb vörös vonalhoz: az iráni atomprogram egyre közelebb jut ahhoz, hogy egy más országokat elpusztítással fenyegető teokrácia kezébe kerüljön nukleáris fegyver. A nemzetközi közösség ugyan bízik szankciói erejében, de én úgy vélem, ez hiú remény. A sokkal keményebb szankciók sem  akadályozták meg az észak-koreai rezsimet, hogy hogy elkészítse saját atomfegyverét. De elpusztíthatóak-e az olyan,  a mélyen föld alá telepített létesítmények, amelyek az iráni atomprogram kulcselemeit tartalmazzák?

[...] Bővebben!