Frequently Asked Questions
General
Q: What is LeapTag?
A: LeapTag is a personalized news reader and content discovery engine. It will show you news, blog posts and books according to your interests. You can then vote on these results to make LeapTag better and better at bringing you relevant results. LeapTag is a hybrid application that runs on your desktop and interacts with the web through your browser. Marc Orchant from ZDNet gives a good description of what LeapTag is.
Q: How is LeapTag different from other discovery tools?
A: LeapTag is unique in several ways but the most important one has to do with results quality and relevancy. LeapTag "learns" from your feedback, which enables it to deeply understand your unique interests. As you work with your tags, either by voting or by tagging other sites, LeapTag refines your tag definition to one that is completely personalized to your interests.
Q: What does LeapTag install on my computer and what does it do?
A: LeapTag installs two components: a toolbar/sidebar in the browser (IE and Firefox) and a background application that continuously monitors news and blog feeds to find articles and posts relevant to your interests. The background application can be controlled via a tray icon on Windows and a status item on the upper right corner on Mac. LeapTag continues working in the background even if your browser is closed.
Q: LeapTag is using 100% CPU on my computer. Is this a problem? What other resources is it using?
A: LeapTag works in the background to continuously monitor feeds for news and blogs that might interest you. It is designed to make the most of your idle CPU cycles, backing off when you are busy. LeapTag should not interfere with your computer's other tasks. If you notice any slowdown in other applications due to LeapTag, please let us know.
As part of discovering what you are interested in and monitoring feeds, LeapTag will use your network connection. The amount of data it transfers while it is monitoring feeds is negligible for a broadband connection (DSL/Cable). Again, please report to us any problems you see in this area.
Since all of your data resides on your computer, LeapTag stores information about your interests and potentially relevant news articles and blog posts on your disk. LeapTag can use up to 1GB of disk space storing this information.
Some users have reported that their computer's fan noise is noticeable. The workaround is to open setup in LeapTag and set the average CPU usage to something lower. This will reduce fan noise as well as heat generated by the CPU.
Q: I'm running LeapTag on a laptop. Will it drain my battery?
A: When your computer is not plugged in, LeapTag senses this and stops monitoring feeds and using your CPU. You will still be able to view your results and vote on them. However, you will not receive any new articles and blog posts, just re-ranking of existing items it has already discovered. It takes a few minutes for LeapTag to notice that your laptop is running on battery and wind down monitoring feeds. However, if after a few minutes, you are not using LeapTag but the background application is still using your CPU, please let us know.
Q: Should I be concerned about my privacy?
A: LeapTag is not a web-based application that runs on servers. All of your private data is kept on your computer, which means that all your interests and all of your votes are private to you. Nothing is transmitted outside your computer.
Q: How do I turn off LeapTag completely?
A: In order to completely shut down LeapTag, you can right-click on the tray icon (Windows) or click on the status item (Mac) and select "Exit". After you quit LeapTag, you will not be able to access the application through the browser. On Windows, you can restart LeapTag by going to the Start menu and selecting "LeapTag". On Mac, you can go to the Applications folder and double-click on "LeapTagLaunch".
Q: What are the files named main
A: These are the logs files LeapTag generates when running. We sometimes ask our Beta users to send us these files in order to debug their problems. These files can be removed at any time. The number of these files are limited to seven (7), as LeapTag only keeps the last seven days' logs.
These logs only contain information about LeapTag's activity and your interaction with LeapTag. It does not include any information on your non-LeapTag browsing activity or anything else on your computer.
Installation/Upgrade
Q: What will happen to my tag/interests when I upgrade?
A: When you upgrade to a newer version of LeapTag, all your interests and related information including training data is kept and transferred to the new version. After completing the upgrade, you will see all your tags in the sidebar. During installation you will be given a chance to delete your tags (currently Mac only). If you select this option, all your interest information will be lost.
Q: How do I backup my LeapTag data?
A: At this time we do not have a backup utility for LeapTag. In the interim you should back up your LeapTag database, which is found under C:/Documents and Settings/
Information for Webmasters
Q: Our logs show multiple hits from LeapTag/0.8.X.betaYYY.rZZZZ. What is this?
A: Here is a short explanation from Ulas:
LeapTag is a personalized content discovery tool. It's desktop software so the user downloads it and runs on his or her computer.
During its operation, LeapTag will pull RSSs that it decides are relevant to the user's interests. It will also pull and look at the content of the RSS items to decide on the user's behalf whether that particular post is relevant. If it is, the post will be displayed as part of the user's results. Even though the entire post is looked at by the algorithm to determine whether a post is relevant, the complete post is only accessible to the user if he or she navigates to your site. In a sense, it is a personalized RSS reader.
By design, each instance of the application respects the basic robots.txt standard, as well as a 1-second minimum delay between hits for any site. If you simply wish to exclude LeapTag from your site, you can insert a "disallow" for LeapTag in your robots.txt.