FeedTree had a pretty good week. After I released version 0.7.0, I sent the article to Slashdot, where it was run on the front page. The comments told me a few things:
- This is not a hot-button topic for Slashdotters; there were very few comments at all. (Furthermore, the Slashdot Effect was nowhere to be seen on our servers; the big iron that runs the main site didn’t really notice, and even the Pentium-III that runs the Trac server and Subversion repository had no issues.)
- A few people don’t get it. “Isn’t this just NNTP?” “Why not use BitTorrent?” etc.
- A lot of Slashdotters (those reading the article, anyway) do get it, and were quick to set straight the naysayers and the clueless (e.g. 1 2).
So after a front-page Slashdot article (which generated approx. 3500 direct hits to feedtree.net), you’d think I’d be drowning in users, right? Well, we spiked at 30, and are currently hovering around 15 users. That’s … well, it’s not a lot. I have a few users who are patiently waiting around while I try to figure out why their routers are blocking Pastry packets, but I think this is pretty much all I’m going to get for a while. Hopefully it’s enough to generate some meaningful data!
Psst, FeedTree users: you do know that if you get more people to use the system, your own service (speed of updates, amount of polling, etc.) should improve, right? Just a suggestion.
Fortunately, the Slashdot story did result in a number of mentions here and there across the Interthing. Perhaps the most surprising was a podcast mention; the GeekNights ‘cast discussed FeedTree in their 2/20 show (starting at 53:46
