Feelibri Weblog

Some numbercrunching.

2008-03-19T00:56:00.001+01:00

Today we will do some numbercrunching. Basic statistical nonsense, only for the people who are interested. First some current numbers:

- Itemcount: 93,445.
- Daily items: around 4,000 during weekdays, around 2,500 during the weekends.
- Feedcount: 183.

Our short-term (within two weeks) target is a feedcount of 250 or higher.

With this target we can calculate some future numbers:

- Daily items: 5,480 during weekdays, around 3,425 during the weekends.

Our search index currently measures 65.4MB which is a nice number. We also have 6.2% of items with the exact same title meaning they were taken from press lines or copied from each other. Over three-quarters of our index are items which describe the same event or story but are from different sources.

We currently index 2.8 items per minute from all around the globe. We have feeds in 13 languages from 21 countries.

What do all these numbers mean? They show our growth, in two-weeks I will post this post again with the new numbers, we can then show some cool growth statistics and we can make this a two-weekly event showing our progress in numbers.

We are planning to go into public beta when our index hits 250.000 items which we consider to be a crititical mass to offer enough data. At our current indexing rate the 250.000 items mark will be reached in and around 6 weeks and 2 days, sooner if we keep adding feeds and sources.

We'll see.

iPhone's and optimalisation.

2008-03-16T00:28:00.000+01:00

The last few weeks have brought us a steady stream of improvements to the site, expect us to go private beta soon, pretty soon.

One of the big chances we did is our static content distribution. All javascript/stylesheets and images are now hosted on another domain. This domain handles all caching, gzipping and everything else to ensure you load as little kilobytes as possible. Using a second domain for serving static content also allows your browser to open up more concurrent connections which boosts loading times.

After these improvements we have achieved an 88% improvement in the size of the frontpage which is now only 2 - 5 kb, depending on the article sizes, to load if you have a primed cache (meaning you visited the site before). This is quite an achievement we are proud of!

On the domain we can also scale very well. We currently only host on Amsterdam based servers Our technology allows us to open up more servers around the globe and make sure you load content from the server which is the closest to you which also adds to improved load times.

The big news however is we are steamrolling ahead in deployment of one of our most promising branches. The mobile one.

We are developing an iPhone specific version, as well as a really simple ticker for older browser phones, a psp-version and an advanced version for the likes of Nokia phones or Opera based phones. All these versions are optimized to work on small screens and make the most of you mobile.

More on this, very soon. For now that's all the improvements we've made in the past two weeks. Stay tuned for more updates.

P.S. We have moved to blogger. We have done this to be able to keep our weblog running even if our servers become unreachable, which we don't expect as our servers have a 100% availability rate at the moment of this writing.

OpenSearch

2008-03-03T11:55:00.000+01:00

Today we have added OpenSearch descriptions to our Feelibri search engine. This means you can now add our fabulous search application to every modern browser (Firefox, IE7 and so on) and can search from the easy premise of your search bar.

We also did some nice improvements. For example, if you like to keep track of your searches you can enable logging to your account (if you do not do this your searches will not be attached to your account). On the search history page you can then see how many links you visited and which of your searches became hot. We even supply you with a RSS or Atom feed of your latest searches. Just for the fun of it.

So nice stuff, we also improved error handling of the entire site and we passed the 40.000 items in our index mark!

What is Feelibri?

2008-02-19T04:31:00.000+01:00

Today I will try to tell you some more about the Feelibri name.

I will start by telling you where our name comes from. When I first started thinking about Feelibri I referred to it as ‘Leesrobot’, the Dutch word for ‘Readrobot’. We still refer to the project as ‘Leesrobot’ but only internally.

The site is going to be all about speed and being versatile. If we would have wanted to keep the name like ‘Leesrobot’ this would mean that we had to register every domainname in every language (for example okumarobotu.tr) which would be a costly operation for a fresh upstart and would also give us problems with the already registered domainnames.

We decided we would not go on with the ‘Leesrobot’-name and look for something else. We also decided to make a profile of the website and what message we wanted to convey. Small, lightweight, fast were the technical keywords and fun, playfull and fierce were the more emotional keywords. We also wanted to do something with the animal kingdom so we started out looking for something fast, fun, beautifull, lightweight and a bit fierce. We ended up with the colibri (or hummingbird).

Colibri is the same word in almost every language around the world. It’s a small lightweight and superfast bird which a lot of people also find adorable.

The name colibri (or kolibri) on itself did not stand out enough, so we went for trying to combine it with one of our core points of interest, feeds. We ended up with two possibilities, feelibri and kolifeed. We opted for the first one as it gives us more possibilities and is a bit softer on the tongue.

Hello world! Hello first week.

2008-02-18T11:15:00.000+01:00

First of all I would like to welcome all interested readers to the Feelibri Weblog. On this weblog we will slowly but surely work together with you on improving and advancing Feelibri services.

Feelibri has set out on a mysterious path through the gutters and the heavens of the internet. We have set high goals for ourselves and are happy to inform you that everything is going according to plan (except minor setbacks, what else is new).

We are planning the launch of our closed beta for the 2nd week of April. That might seem like a long time to you? It is not, at least, not for us.

As for the geeky side in us, we are already generating statistics of Feelibri’s vitals. We have had a solid week of indexing now and already some well known statistical images are starting to form.

As you can see we have an decline of the indexing rate over the weekends. Also you might notice the spikes every day around 1 AM. Those are newspapers which blurt out all their items for the next day at once.

You can also guestimate our rate of indexing at approximately 60 items per hour or 1 item every minute. As we expect this rate to grow we hope to hit the 2 to 3 items per minute by the launch of the closed beta which would give us an 120 to 180 per hour rate and about 3000 to 4000 items every day (we are currently at about 2000 items per day).

For more statistics of Feelibri’s vitals you can visit our statistics page.