On Thursday, Blockbuster Alaska announced that the rental chain's last two Alaskan stores will shut down on Monday, with liquidation sales to follow. The news means that only one Blockbuster store will remain in the United States, in Bend, Oregon.

"We hope to see you at our stores during the closing, even if it’s just to say 'Hello,'" the final two shops' managers posted in a Facebook announcement on Thursday. "What a great time to build your media library and share some Blockbuster memories with us."

In its report, the Anchorage Daily News confirmed with Border Entertainment, a Texas-based holding company that operated all of Alaska's Blockbuster stores, that closure plans had been in the works since before the end of 2017. At that time, Border decided to stop renewing any Blockbuster store leases, resulting in a series of closures across the state over the past nine months.

Though the video rental chain languished in the face of rampant streaming and online-sales competition, Blockbuster stores had a different lease on life in Alaska, where network deployment has proven expensive and reliant on government subsidies—and has resulted in high per-megabyte costs and cries of possible monopolies. Border told the ADN that its remaining Blockbuster shops were still pulling a profit as of press time, though that profit had been declining.

Non-Alaskans may best know these soon-to-shutter Blockbuster stores thanks to a Last Week Tonight stunt in which host John Oliver sent Russell Crowe memorabilia (including a used $7,000 jockstrap) to the stores in April. Border owner Alan Payne told the ADN that he planned to ship all of the items "back to the owner, which is fine, because I don't want a jockstrap in my house."

While Blockbuster may be down to only one American shop—whose owner in Bend, Oregon, spoke to the ADN in its report—other independent shops have continued coming up with ways to keep video, DVD, and Blu-ray stocks available to the public, including shifts to nonprofit status and educational efforts.

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We are pleased to announce that the most popular iOS client for reddit, Alien Blue, is now an official reddit app.

It’s the exact same Alien Blue app you know and love, plus some bug fixes and an updated icon.

You can download the new Alien Blue from the iOS store here. Note: it may take a while to show up in the App Store in your area; please be patient and keep trying.

To celebrate and ease the move to reddit, everyone can get the Alien Blue Pro upgrade free for one week. The iPad app will also be free until we integrate it with the iPhone app and the two become one universal app.

We have a few ideas for features to add in the near future and it will only get better. Enjoy, and please share feedback!

We’re also happy to say that its lead developer, Jase Morrissey, has joined us as our first Aussie. We have been working closely with Jase for the past several years and are thrilled to officially welcome him to our team.

Jase Morrissey (/u/jase), mobile software engineer

G'day folks! I'm Jase, and I'm absolutely thrilled to be joining the very talented reddit crew. I'm the developer of Alien Blue and have been working closely with reddit for many years now. I'm an iOS developer by profession, but I adore building software on any device or machine that I can get my hands on. I'm almost always lurking on /r/PCGaming, /r/Games and of course, /r/AlienBlue. Now that I'm an official member of the team, I'm hoping to spend even more time doing what I love - building fun and powerful software for all of you.

We’re also continuing to work with other third-party app developers and will continue to do so, because we believe our communities are interested in multiple ways to experience reddit. In the past six months, we’ve improved our API, added OAuth for apps, and added gold features to help build our mobile developer ecosystem.

Alien Blue will join the official reddit AMA app in the App Store, along with all the awesome third-party apps for reddit. Thank you for all your support!

In this industry, you gotta be tough.

I’m just kidding. We’re a bunch of literates who enjoy reading so much that we built our own news readers. But when a behemoth like Google makes a call that places you at the business end of 100,000 frantic power users, reminding yourself how tough you are is one way of dealing with the madness.

Google announced Reader’s sunset at 4pm on March 13th, 2013. At that point I had spent three and a half years building my vision of a better news reader. I clearly wasn’t doing it for the money, since my paltry salary didn’t even cover my market rate rent in San Francisco. RSS was a decidedly stupid technology to piggyback off of to try and cover that financial disconnect.

Take a look at this graph. It shows NewsBlur’s income versus its expenses for the past 16 months. Just look at those few months before the Google Reader shutdown announcement in March 2013.

It was never hard to justify to others why I worked on a news reader for three-some years, partially because I’d been justifying it to myself for so long. I had the delusion that it would all work itself out in the end, so long as I kept pushing my hardest and shipping features users wanted. And, at the time, with 1,000 paying subscribers, it certainly felt like I was getting somewhere.

If you’re curious about why expenses are so high, think about what it takes to run a modern and popular news reader. This graph breaks down expenses for an average month from the past year.

Why spend all that money on subcontractors and new tools? Because I’m investing in building an even better news reader.

Fast forward a year and let hindsight tell you what’s what. I was irrational to think that I could make it on my own in a decaying market, what with all the air sucked out by Google. But that three year hallucination kept me persevering to build a better product, which positioned NewsBlur well as a strong candidate for a Reader replacement. When the sunset announcement dropped, it didn’t take long to fortify the servers and handle all the traffic. NewsBlur permanently ballooned up to 20X the number of paid users. People flocked to NewsBlur because it was among the furthest along in creating real competition. As we say on NewsBlur, the people have spoken.

The post-Google Reader landscape

I run a very opinionated news reader. If you think somewhat like I do, you couldn’t be more pleased with the direction NewsBlur goes. But this is still a power tool, and in a world of casual readers who don’t care where their news is coming from so long as it’s in their interests and matches their biases, NewsBlur is the coffee equivalent of the AeroPress. Most people want drip coffee and they don’t bother wasting mental energy on caring about the difference in taste or quality. It’s a binary to them: coffee or no coffee. There’s nothing wrong with that, they just choose to focus on other things more important to them than the sourcing or control they have of their coffee.

Many competing news readers are visual and offer a similar experience. When you want to give up control in exchange for the digested output of sophisticated and heartless algorithms, they’re your best bet. When you want to exert control and know what you want and from which sources, NewsBlur is the only option. No other reader gives you training, statistics, and sharing in one multi-platform app. Nobody else cares so much about RSS as to work on a news reader when it was still a financial inevitability of failure.

Future work on NewsBlur

If the past is any indication, NewsBlur is going to continue to see many more improvements. This graph of contributions from the past 365 days shows my level of unwavering dedication.

One way people speak is by committing code to NewsBlur’s GitHub repo. Try developing your own pet feature. I’ll even do some of the hard work for you, so long as you give it a good try and submit a pull request.

Meanwhile, I’m using the windfall to develop a secret project that will complement NewsBlur in a way that hasn’t been tried before with any reader. And if that fails, I’ll find an even better way to make my users happy with their purchase. If you thought I was relentless before March 13th, 2013, just wait until you see what I’m capable of with the finances to build all the big ticket features I’ve been imagining for years.

And while you’re here, do me a favor and tweet about NewsBlur. Tell your followers, who are probably looking for a better way to read news, about how much you rely on NewsBlur. Reading positive tweets about NewsBlur every morning (and afternoon and evening and before bed) make this the best job I’ve ever had.

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way to automatically copy your saved stories over to Evernote or Twitter or Pinboard? What about an automatic way to keep track of your unread focus (trained) stories in Buffer or Delicious or Dropbox?

IFTTT (if this then that) is a free web service that automates the movement of data from NewsBlur to dozens of other web services. It also handles movement of data from dozens of other web services back into NewsBlur. Today IFTTT is launching a NewsBlur channel where you can take advantage of their incredible glue that binds dozens of web service like NewsBlur in unique and customizable ways.

Customizable IFTTT triggers

The best part about these IFTTT recipes is that the triggers can be customized to fit a specific saved story tag or blurblog or folder or feed. When you create a recipe using NewsBlur, you can choose which of your own feeds or tags you want to use.

You can also choose to only use unread focus (trained) stories. So you can filter out stories you don’t want to read and highlight the stories you do want to read using the Intelligence Trainer.

Create tasks and recipes with IFTTT

Here’s a sample of IFTTT recipes that you can use today for moving your data from NewsBlur out to other services:

You can also take data from other services and move it into NewsBlur:

Mix and match and create your own IFTTT recipes using the NewsBlur channel. And if you put together a good recipe, it’ll get featured both on IFTTT and on NewsBlur.

As always, thanks for using my Amazon Affiliate links (US, UK, Canada).