Switching back to Newshutch

When Newshutch first came out, I was amazed. I immediately exported my OPML from my current reader, and started using it. Then, it’s wonderful interface became known by the guys at 37Signals (they have an awesome audience), and they posted about Newshutch on their blog. The traffic to Newshutch immediately exploded and their server started overheating. It became entirely too slow for me, so I jumped over to Bloglines until they got things under control. Bloglines is really fast, but it’s not very clear on navigation and I find myself often wondering, “What does this do?” The Bloglines interface needs a lot of work. Anyway, I decided to check up on Newshutch to see how they were coming along, and not to my surprise, they’re running very smooth. A lot of their complications were due to a lack of optimization of their SQL statements, which was taking way too long to get the data for all of those new users. I believe they now have a dedicated server just to host MySQL, and they’ve tweeked all of their queries to be much more efficient.

So, I’m making the switch back to one of the few readers I can actually tolerate. There are still a couple of things I’d like to see added on to Newshutch, but I’ll save that for another time on a different day.