Week #3 - Subscribing to subreddits, performance and UI improvements

Lector is a content aggregator for the modern web, where just subscribing to RSS/Atom feeds doesn't cut anymore because everything is someone's walled garden. In week #2 I added the capability of subscribing to YouTube channels, so this past week obviously involved fixing a lot of small glitches related to that :) It still needs some improvements so Lector doesn't blow up API quotas very easily, but so far the volume is small enough that it doesn't matter.

Also on the topic of improvements, I'm making good progress on making the UI prettier and more user friendly. Forms got an overhaul, the entries you read now have more readable styles by adding more spacing between elements (particularly videos), and I introduced flash messages for success and error notifications for certain actions like logging in and out, and subscribing to content. Last but not least, the subscription summary (Lector's main page, where you get a summary of all unread content) got 10x faster by rewriting some SQL to use window functions instead of correlated subqueries.

In terms of new features, I just shipped the ability to subscribe to subreddits. Granted, Reddit's API is much simpler than YouTube's, but still, I was able to ship this in under two hours versus almost two days for YouTube, so I'm confident I can now ship new integrations in no time now that I have a somewhat comprehensive library of patterns I can use.

Now that new integrations became easy, it's time to focus on other things. For this week, I plan to improve the onboarding experience. Some people did sign up for the trial, but just left without subscribing to anything, so it's pretty clear people don't know what to do on an empty account. Time to finish up that OPML import, and whip up some copy to guide people when they first sign up.

Thanks for following my progress, and see you next week!