A list of the smaller improvements from June and July. As in May, most of the reading ones went into Feedsweep, with the rest in Feedstand itself. The biggest change of the summer was link previews for most of the web.

Embeds

• Many blogs ship a lazy-load placeholder instead of a real video, relying on JavaScript a feed reader never runs, so the post showed an empty box. Videos and audio hidden behind these plugins now play.
• Vimeo, Dailymotion, and JW Player embeds display alongside the already-supported YouTube.
• Datawrapper charts show as their chart image, linked to the interactive version.

Reading

• Forum smilies and emoji sprites from around twenty forum and blog engines are swapped for the real character, so text reads and copies correctly.
• Code blocks show a language badge, diffs style their added and removed lines, and line-number gutters copied from the publisher's highlighter are stripped, so copying code copies only code.
• Syntax highlighting only applies when the publisher declared a language, so no more wrongly-colored blocks.
• Cookie-consent plugins leave dead "accept cookies to view this content" boxes in feeds; those are now removed.
• Podcast and video items get real players, artwork, and durations, including items imported before this change.
• Email and phone links inside articles survive cleanup instead of being stripped.
• Reader view keeps embeds, and when extraction fails it falls back to the feed's own content instead of showing nothing.
• A typography pass on headings, lists, and quotes, so long articles breathe better.

Images

• Images now load through a proxy, which fixes broken images and keeps reading private.
• Images keep their real dimensions, so articles stop jumping around while loading.
• YouTube thumbnails fall back to a real frame when YouTube serves its gray placeholder, and videos without usable dimensions default to 16:9.

Reliability

• An edited title, a republished article with a bumped date, or a swapped header image no longer shows up as a duplicate item.
• Feed polling got more reliable and more polite: feeds are checked at a pace matching how they publish, and the servers behind them are respected.
• Adding a site by a deep URL got smarter: the feed is also looked for at the parent paths and in the page's section links.

One more thing is close: native video and audio uploads from newsletter and podcast platforms becoming playable right in the reader. That is for the next post.