Lighthouse update February 23rd

During the past week a couple of nice improvements happened.

Finally implemented a 2 week trial without requiring a credit card

Every user now gets the trial by default. This is a nice improvement because, from what I can observe, in B2C most people want to test the product before entering their credit card. It was also a good step to a better first product experience.

Finished the website to feed feature

The last remaining task was automated finding of items. When you enter a website, it automatically checks it and tries to find relevant items. If items are found, they are highlighted and the selectors added, without users having to do anything.

Updated blogroll editor

This is a small free tool on the Lighthouse website. It’s for creating collections of feeds, websites, and newsletters. For a long time I wanted to create collections for specific areas, for example company engineering blogs, AI labs, JavaScript ecosystem, and so on. The reworked blogroll editor makes that much simpler to do.

Next steps

An issue that became important is feed URLs being behind bot protection. It doesn’t really make sense to be configured that way, because feed URLs are designed to be accessed by bots, but in some cases it may be difficult to configure properly. This affects only for a small number of feeds, but it’s enough to be noticable. It prevents people from moving to Lighthouse from other services. Consequently, one of the next tasks is to fix this.

Besides that, the first user experience continues to be an ongoing area of improvement. I have a couple of ideas on how to make it better, and will continuously work on it.