Reedah.com News

New and improved Reedah features

Mon, 26 Oct 2026 19:56:14 -0500

Reedah’s feed reader page has been refreshed with a cleaner look and more responsive feel. You’ll also find that our mobile reader (https://www.reedah.com/m/) has been significantly updated.

What else is new?

Language support for German, French and Russian. These are the most popular three languages in the feed database behind English.
Search is improved: in speed, in language-specific stemming, and with more configurable search settings.
Tags can be optionally colour-coded so that tagged articles are highlighted in the reader (“Tag appearance” option from the Tags drop-down).
Rules: You can now create rules which perform an action on an article (mark it read or starred, tag it, etc.) meeting certain criteria. Find rules under the Tags drop-down.
Tags in the sidebar: in Tag appearance, specific tags can be configured to appear as “pseudo-feeds” in the sidebar. Coupled with rules, this allows you to quickly access topics across your feeds.
Airplane mode: previously, the items were marked read immediately and required a connection to the server. Now, if you’re offline, your actions are queued and sent to the server when you’re back online (requires browser support; may not work in all browsers).
Themes: automatic (follows system theme), light, dark.
Other minor UI changes, like “compact mode” for the sidebar which reduces the space between lines so that more fits on the screen.

What hasn’t changed: you can still access the old version of the reader (“classic reader”), and the API is completely unchanged.

Overall we’ve seen RSS use declining, so we’re deciding how to manage this going forward. It may be that Reedah continues as-is, becoming something more niche as the world moves on. Or it may be that we consider importing content from the sources people are starting to use (Telegram feeds and so on).

If you have any feedback on the new features, or on language translations (they aren’t perfect), please contact us on X or via email, details on our contact page, https://www.reedah.com/contact.html.

Refreshing Reedah

Sat, 03 Oct 2026 22:16:32 -0500

Over the coming days we’ll be rolling out an update to Reedah bringing a cleaner, more modern look.

We’re also introducing “offline reading”. Reedah will sync feeds to your device so that you can read them while disconnected, and their status will sync when you’re back online. You don’t need to do anything; this happens transparently if your device/browser allow it.

If you prefer the old interface, simply choose “classic reader” from the menu.

Behind the scenes we’ve upgraded some software that had reached end-of-life, and done some backend database tuning.

We’re finding that some feeds are more difficult to scan lately due to “AI bot” prevention tools, and there might not be much we can do about that, but it’s a topic on our radar.

As always, please let us know if you have feedback or encounter problems.

Reedah updates

Sun, 13 Sep 2015 09:50:10 -0500

It has been a while since our Reedah RSS feed was last updated. We are still going strong, and would like to communicate some Reedah updates we are planning.

In terms of interface, we are aiming to refresh the web-based reader. We aren’t planning a total redesign, but want to make it faster and less clunky. We will introduce features such as the ability to sort and order your feeds and nest folders. We are exploring internationalization - if you would like to help translate Reedah, please let us know.

We are also planning some architecture changes. A number of our users are in Europe, so we plan to set up some new servers closer to those users. We have already made some changes “behind the scenes” which have shaved up to 30 minutes off the refresh times for some feeds and also led to Reedah being generally more reliable.

If you have any feedback or requests, now would be a great time to bring those to our attention! As always, you can contact us via email (talk2us@reedah.com) or on Twitter @ReedahRdr.

Reedah and 'Heartbleed'

Wed, 09 Apr 2014 19:43:10 -0500

Short version for non-technical readers: There has been a security flaw affecting a large part of the internet. Reedah, like many other web sites, recommends that you change your password.

What is ‘Heartbleed’?

A bug in OpenSSL was publicized on 7 April 2014 and has been nicknamed 'Heartbleed’. It can allow traffic that should be encrypted to be captured and viewed. For more information, see http://heartbleed.com/

How does 'Heartbleed’ affect Reedah?

Reedah used an affected version of OpenSSL. It is possible that traffic between Reedah’s web site and your browser was not as secure as you believed.

By default, most Reedah traffic is not encrypted and therefore not affected by 'Heartbleed’. For the majority of users this flaw only affects your Reedah username and password.

Does this mean someone stole my data?

No. 'Heartbleed’ is considered a serious flaw, but the existence of a flaw does not mean that it has been exploited for malicious purposes. Many thousands of web sites were/are affected by this issue, and we have no information that suggests Reedah was specifically targeted. At the same time, we cannot exclude the possibility.

What has been done?

We upgraded OpenSSL to fix this flaw on 8 April 2014. We also had our SSL certificate re-issued using new keys.

What should I do?

We recommend that you change your password for Reedah, and for any other web sites that were affected by 'Heartbleed’ once they have fixed the flaw.

Reedah outage post-mortem

Sat, 08 Feb 2014 21:43:28 -0600

As you probably noticed, Reedah was down for around two days in the past week. First, please accept our apologies for that outage.

For the technically-inclined, the server running our core database (the one which handles user accounts, authentication, etc.) went down. We restored it from a backup.

Because of that, we did lose several days of changes. Any articles that were marked read, starred, tagged, etc. during that time have been reset. If you want to catch up quickly, you can use the “mark items older than a week as read” via the web-based Reedah.

Our crawlers have re-fetched the missing articles, and everything should now be back to normal. Of course, articles that have since “dropped off” a feed cannot be re-fetched by the crawler.

Our vendor who provides the database server had been very reliable (in fact, we’ve been quite impressed) up to that point. However, their “crisis management” was lacking. We still don’t have a clear answer to why the server went down, although we suspect a disk failure.

We already had a plan to create a redundant “failover” sever, and going forward we will accelerate that plan. Once completed, this will achieve the related goals of reducing our reliance on a particular vendor, and of reducing the risk of downtime.

We certainly consider the downtime to be a serious inconvenience (as said before, we eat our own dog food!), and again apologize for that. Thank you for your support and patience.

Preview Reedah's new mobile site

Sat, 28 Dec 2013 07:18:57 -0600

A key goal of Reedah is to let you sync and read your feeds on different devices. That’s been difficult for iOS users, because no apps (that we’re aware of) support the Reedah API, and iOS apps are not easy to hack.

Today we’re taking the wraps off a mobile version of Reedah’s web reader, http://www.reedah.com/m.

Of course, this is not just for iOS users. If you read your feeds on any smartphone or mobile device, and don’t have a Reedah-enabled app, this may be something to try.

There’s a lot more variation between mobile browsers than desktop browsers, and we’ve only tested Reedah’s mobile site on a handful of phones and tablets. So please consider it to be a ‘preview’ and let us know your feedback.

Reedah and gReader/News+

Tue, 08 Oct 2013 10:49:48 -0500

For those of you with Android devices, we’re pleased to inform you that Reedah will support 2-way sync in News+ starting from tomorrow.

News+ and gReader are two great apps, both written by the same developer.

News+ will work with Reedah as-is. No need to modify anything - simply install, configure, and sync. The exact steps are:

Install the Reedah News+ extension.
Install the News+ beta.
Start News+ and click the top-left, and choose Reedah.

The disadvantage of News+ is that it is beta software which has bugs and is missing some features.

gReader is a mature and feature-packed product, but it does not support Reedah without modification.

Additionally, we’ve found that gReader has a slight incompatibility with the Google Reader API. To work around this, after we enable News+ tomorrow, gReader will need a minor additional modification (one further find-replace), or it will stop working. Our Android guide has been updated accordingly.

Please contact us with any questions or issues.

A new Reedah blog, and more

Sun, 06 Oct 2013 09:58:42 -0500

Although Reedah hasn’t undergone much visible change over the past month, we’ve been very busy behind the scenes.

New blog. There’s a new Reedah blog on Tumblr. We’ll be automatically redirecting this URL to the blog’s RSS feed (or you can update your subscriptions manually to http://news.reedah.com/rss).

New forum. We’ve set up a forum at Boardhost, http://reedah.boardhost.com. You’re still very welcome to contact us via email or Twitter, but we thought a forum might be a useful alternative.

New servers. We’ve finished moving all feeds to new “crawlers”, and have been doing some fine-tuning. In case you’re interested, we’re publishing a “crawler” status page (must be signed in).

App instructions. By popular demand, we’ve posted some instructions for modifying FeedDemon and Android apps (like gReader) to work with Reedah.

Dead feed detection. Over the next week, Reedah will begin inserting warning notices into feeds that appear ‘dead’. These notices serve two purposes. First, they help you distinguish between feeds that simply have little activity and those which Reedah is having trouble checking. Second, if a feed is truly dead (e.g. the domain name is no longer registered), Reedah is going to stop checking it. Currently we estimate that around 10% of feeds are irretrievably dead.

Beta update. We had planned to start migrating some users to our beta server 2-3 weeks ago, but we had some unexpected events (completely unrelated to Reedah) that caused a delay. We’ll be writing more about the beta shortly.

Reedah downtime, and new (faster) beta

Thu, 29 Aug 2013 21:00:00 -0500

Yesterday we took Reedah down for some routine maintenance (we thought). It ended up being inaccessible for about 24 hours, and we’d first like to sincerely apologize for that. We’re dedicating this article to informing you about what is going on.

On the minus side: we made a mistake during the maintenance, and ran out of disk space. We had to transfer hundreds of GB of data to another server, and recreate parts of the database (specifically, some indexes). This is why it took longer than we expected. Furthermore, you may have noticed that Reedah is running a bit slow. We still need to recreate one part of the database. We’ll (unfortunately) need to take Reedah offline again to do that, but we wanted to leave it up for a while as-is, so that you can sync and we can do some tests.

Additionally, we’ve been informed of planned network maintenance on our web server at 12:00 UTC today, which will cause the Reedah web site to be unavailable for up to an hour. To the extent possible, we will align our database downtime with that.

On the plus side: we already have a better and faster system in the works. In fact, we’re already using it for our own feeds, and if you solely use Reedah’s API (hello, FeedDemon users) and would like to beta test, we’ll be ready to switch you in the next few days. For those who have asked about a mobile-friendly site, this is the reason you haven’t seen it yet - we’ve designed it for the new system, rather than the old one.

What will make Reedah better and faster? Two things, really. First, we’ve made it easy to “scale”, i.e. add more servers as we grow. The new system already uses three servers instead of one. Second, when Reedah started, we did our best design without much data available, but with four months under our belt and hundreds of GB of data, there are things we’ve learned. Our new system implements those design improvements.

You may already be noticing the benefits of the new “crawl server”. It tries to repair broken feeds, so if some of your feeds have recently come back to life, this may explain why. It seems to help with international feeds in particular. We still only have about 10% of our feeds on this new server, and the rest are being migrated at a steady pace.

To conclude, we’d like to again apologize for yesterday’s downtime, and thank you for using Reedah. We’ll keep you informed of our progress as it improves. Don’t hesitate to contact us via email or twitter if you have any comments or suggestions!

Send-to features, keyboard shortcuts added to Reedah, along with OPML export

Mon, 12 Aug 2013 18:00:00 -0500

Today we’re rolling out some enhancements to Reedah’s web-based interface.

Send-to functionaliy (Instapaper, Evernote, Pocket, …)
Apart from adding the ability to email article links, we’ve added many popular ‘send-to’ services.
Bookmark articles or save them for offline reading using a 'send-to’ service like Instapaper, Evernote, Pocket or Pinboard. Share articles using social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest and more. Customize the send-to list by hiding services that you don’t use. Are we missing a service you use? Let us know.

Keyboard shortcuts
Today’s revision also adds most of the Google Reader keyboard shortcuts to Reedah. You can find a guide to keyboard shortcuts here.

OPML export
We don’t want you to feel trapped by Reedah. You can now export your subscriptions as an OPML file from your account settings page.

Easier signup
We’ve made the process of creating a Reedah account better, e.g. by showing whether an entry is valid before you click 'Submit’, and we also ask your timezone on the signup page. This is so that the article times are displayed correctly for you.

Bug fixes and minor improvements
Thanks to everyone who sent feedback, we’ve made a number of less visible changes too. The 'tick’ button on the toolbar now marks the current feed as read and moves to the next one. Rename or unsubscribe by right-clicking on a feed and using the context menu. We’ve changed the 'pre-fetching’ of articles so that infinite scrolling should be smoother, and added site icons. Plus the inevitable bug fixes.

For those who use browser add-ins to subscribe to feeds (e.g. Google’s RSS Subscription extension for Chrome), you can use the following URL for Reedah: http://www.reedah.com/subscribe.php?feed=%s

Our efforts to improve Reedah are currently focused on two areas. First, we’re improving the speed - we know, it’s currently too slow. We’ve been testing a new database with about 1% of the feeds, and will soon be moving the rest. Second, we’re working on a mobile site to make it easier to use Reedah on devices like iPhones or iPads. We currently have a mock-up and aim to make a beta version available in a week or two. Stay tuned!

Reedah adds OPML import, new web-based reader features

Sun, 30 Jun 2013 17:00:00 -0500

With only hours until Google Reader’s scheduled shut-down, remember to back up your data! To keep you reading, we’ve made three changes at Reedah we’d like you to know about:

OPML import
Our Google Reader import page now lets you upload an OPML (XML) file, or even the full Google Takeout zip file. Importing using OPML only sets up your subscriptions in Reedah. The Google Takeout file additionally imports your starred items. This upload-based importing will continue to work even after Google Reader shuts down.

Faster and more reliable direct import
We’ve made our servers faster. This affects everything, including importing. If you’ve tried to import before and found it a bit slow, and you’re reading this by June 30, you might want to try again. The advantage of importing directly (rather than using a Google Takeout file) is that tagged articles, articles marked ‘keep unread’ etc. are also imported. Google Takeout doesn’t store this information.

Web-based reader features
We’ve spruced up our web-based reader. You now have the ability to hide read feeds; some keyboard shortcuts are available (more to come); and the toolbar stays visible at the top for easier navigation.

We’ve also been playing with apps to make them work with Reedah. So far, we’ve had good success with gReader on Android, gNewsReader on Symbian, Feed Demon on Windows, and RSSOwl on Apple OS X. We’ll put some screenshots up when Google Reader stops working.

Reedah can still be improved. Over the next few weeks, expect to see faster performance (there will be a few periods of downtime needed for this), and further improvements in the web-based reader such as more keyboard shortcuts.

Reedah's redesigned web-based reader launched

Sun, 05 May 2013 05:00:00 -0500

A new web-based reader has been launched on reedah.com. Reedah now has most of Google Reader’s features, including the ability to tag or ‘star’ articles, mark read (or keep 'unread’), and manage your subscriptions via the web. The new release also includes a search function. Of course, features such as infinite scrolling and automatically marking read when scrolling were included in Reedah from day one. At the same time, we have improved the process for importing Google Reader data to include tags and 'starred’ items.

Reedah adds Google Reader import

Thu, 18 Apr 2013 21:00:00 -0500

We’ve added the ability to import your Google Reader feeds and read/unread state into Reedah.

Reedah is born

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 18:00:00 -0500

Today we’re opening Reedah for signups. There’s not much the average user can do with it yet, but tecchies who like to hack their Google Reader apps are welcome to play around. We’ll announce new functionality here as time goes on.