Building a community
Gareth Simpson: Objectively speaking, if I downloaded FeedThing in its current state, I’d not bother with it again (I know this by the pile of dead aggregators in my recycle bin).
I first heard about this by chasing this referer. Impressed, I took a look at the code. It looks like something I could work with.
If I can be so bold as to make a suggestion... if your ultimate goal is to have a large user base, your best bet is to invest in cultivating a development community. You identified the important criteria: instant gratification. A developer who wishes to contribute needs to be able to quickly make a change and see the result of that change. Which means that they need to build it. So my first suggestion is for you to invest in a README which tells potential contributors what the minimum they need to install and configure in order to build FeedThing successfully.
In particular, can one get started with only the vctoolkit? Don Box implies that all that is missing is Emacs... is that true in this case, or is there something else crucial thing missing?
The next thing I would suggest is some test cases. If others are going to contribute, you will want to make sure that the things that you have invested the time in getting to work, continue to work as changes are incorporated.