Nightly build 338 includes new statistics reports that show blog activities.(Under Tools->Channel Statistics) It’s kinda embarrassing to find this blog among the least active blog in last 60 days among my subscriptions…

The most-active-blog report is less informative because major news sites like CNN and Yahoo occupy most slots. It would be more useful if I can find a way to tell who’re the individual bloggers and only include them in the statistics. Maybe add a threshold that excludes sites publishing more than 10 items a day?

Yesterday I got a chance to check last week’s server log: 10K+ downloads in a week because of the new public beta. Not bad for a tiny rss reader in a crowded market, especially considering I hasn’t published it on any download sites like CNET or Tucows. Thank you everyone who helped spreading GreatNews!

One thing in the log surprised me is that 52.7% of downloads are for GreatNews.zip. I thought most downloads are to upgrade from previous versions, and user would have downloaded much more setup_unicode.exe or GreatNews_upgrade.zip. No wonder I keep getting emails complaining channels disappeared after upgrade….

I guess having two zip files is too confusing for average users. I’m going to change GreatNews in upcoming build 336 so that a single zip file can be used for both new install and upgrade . Hopefully when next beta is released, nobody suffers losing channel subscription again.

It seems every tech-related blog mentioned Google Blog Search one way or another today. For fun I added Google Blog Search to GreatNews search channel list in nightly build 331, so I can have an excuse to talk about it too!

Randy showed a trick to track links to your blog through google blog search. For example, to track links to my site, I added a new search channel, select “Google Blog Search”, and set keyword to link:curiostudio.com. Works great!

Update: I added “Google Blog Search By Date” in Build 333. The link tracking works even better this way…

Two easy steps:

1. Install FireFox extension Feed Your Reader
2. In GreatNews Tools->Options dialog, click the button [Set GreatNews as the default feed aggregator].

Now if you click Live Bookmark icon in FireFox, the feed will be subscribed in GreatNews.

Update: FireFox 2.0 has built-in support for RSS subscription. You can now link GreatNews to FireFox by Tools->Options->Feeds.

The new tab function in build 326 caused some confusion in when GreatNews opens new browser window and when opens a new tab. GreatNews works this way:

• By default, clicking a rss link will open the link in the same tab. SHIFT+Click will open in new browser window. Middle-click will open in new tab.
• If “open rss link in external browser” option was selected, clicking a rss link will always open in new window.
• If “disable tabbed browsing” option was selected, all new tab functions will open in new window instead.

Hope this can clarify some confusions.

Growing rapidly since alpha launch in January, GreatNews today has thousands of users from more than 60 countries/regions around the world. Here are the top 15: