I cranked pretty hard on some new features for Bloglines. We rolled out the Bloglines Notifier, which is a tiny (100kb) Windows application that puts a little icon in your system tray. Whenever you have new items in your Bloglines account, the icon changes and a little window pops up. Great for, well, being notified that you have new things to read. Tomorrow we’ll be rolling out a couple of additional features, as suggested by our great users.

Yesterday, we announced that Bloglines supports blogrolls. See that list of links on the left side of my blog? That’s automatically generated by Bloglines, based on my subscriptions there. We’ve tried to make it very flexible; you can have it show only an individual folder. You can mark specific subscriptions public or private. In other big Bloglines news, on Monday we passed 4 million blog entries in our database. This is a huge resource of knowledge, and it’s completely searchable.

I’m nose to the grind-stone working on Bloglines, which seems to continue to gain traction. Here’s a nice article on RSS and Newspapers, with a great mention of Bloglines. Thanks! I’ve mainly been working on backend issues with Bloglines, stuff that’s not user visible. It should be done this week, which is good because working on new features is always more fun.

Yesterday I took another step in my flying career. I completed my second supervised solo. This now means that I can go practice without having my instructor around. Of course, I’m subject to many limitations, on weather and other things. But still, I’m very happy. Bloglines continues to gain momentum. I’m getting an amazing amount of great feedback. Everyone who uses it seems to really like the service. I just need to continue to focus on getting the word out, and continue to roll out new features.

Today, after two months of flying lessons, and dozens upon dozens of supervised take-offs and landings, I soloed for the first time. I did 3 take-offs and landings on my own at Palo Alto, in Citabria N5054B. Below is a picture of the plane and I after the flight. Right after that picture was taken, as per tradition, the back of my shirt was cut off and marked up to commemorate the event.