Updates November 4: Free newsletter to RSS tool

It's been a while since the last changelog entry, but development on Lighthouse didn't stop. Here are a few of the changes since the last update. There were also a lot of changes under the hood, which make Lighthouse more reliable and set it up for new features in the future.

Newsletter to RSS

Lighthouse always natively supported subscribing to newsletters, and didn't differentiate between newsletters and RSS feeds. Even the free plan allows subscribing to newsletters.

But sometimes it's better to have an RSS feed for a newsletter. This is why Lighthouse now offers a free tool to convert newsletters into RSS feeds.

Try it out at https://lighthouseapp.io/tools/newsletter-to-rss.

UX Improvement: Global add button

There's now a button on the top left that makes it faster accessible to add new content, views, rules, and subscribe to feeds and newsletters.

UX Improvement: Archive and bookmark directly in summary window

It's now possible to bookmark and archive content directly from the summary window.

UX Improvement: Updated rating component

Rating content helps a lot with managing it, and especially with search. It's possible that content has zero value to the reader, and it was always important to be able to represent that.

The rating component was always designed to acommodate a rating of 0, but with the previous version it was unclear that it was a rating component, because it was so different from typical ones.

The new rating component uses the typical stars, and represents the rating of 0 with an empty star.

Google Reader API includes full content

Previously the articles retrieved via the Google Reader API only included the summary. Since the summary is only available on the Premium plan, many users didn't see any content.

Going forward the Google Reader API will also include the full content of articles, so that any reader apps (e.g. Reeder 5) will immediately show the content of downloaded articles.