About Us

What?

Feed Informer is a parser, regenerator, and syndicator for, and of, RSS and Atom feeds. It lets you do things like:

  • put the content of RSS or Atom feeds on your own site(s), e.g.:
    • get your del.icio.us / digg links on your site automatically
    • get your Flickr links on your site automatically
    • have automatically updating links to other blogs
    • create news alerts and news digests
  • syndicate your blog’s content and/or links to other sites
  • mix multiple feeds together into a single feed (Atom and RSS)
  • convert RSS to Atom, and vice versa
  • filter RSS and Atom feeds
  • turn RSS and Atom feeds into a JavaScript include to use anywhere (even free Web space)
  • turn feed(s) into WAP pages for cellphone use
  • merge all blog mentions of your company into a single page
  • have automatic local weather updates on your page(s)
  • merge RSS services with your Web site

Who?

Feed Informer started life as Feed Digest, which was initially conceived, developed, funded, and designed by Peter Cooper, an English developer and entrepreneur. In September 2005, Curious Office Partners made an investment into Feed Digest securing its future. In August 2007, Feed Digest was sold to its new owners, Informer Technologies, Inc., and in 2008 rebranded to Feed Informer.

History

Feed Digest’s predecessor was RSS Digest, a popular service with almost 10,000 registered users and 1 million requests per day. RSS Digest was built to solve the developer’s own problem, namely to put his del.icio.us links onto his weblog and have them update automatically for visitors to enjoy.

How RSS Digest Hit It Big

A prototype was released, which was designed to deal with up to 50,000 requests per day. It worked so well that it was launched as a proper service to the community, and suddenly had to deal with a lot of public interest. After a few weeks it became clear 50,000 requests per day wouldn’t cut the mustard, so "RSS Digest 2", a complete rearchitecture of RSS Digest, was developed. RSS Digest 2 launched in January 2005, and scaled up to a million requests per day.

How Feed Digest Was Named

Feed Digest was originally called “RSS Digest 3″, but in May 2005 we decided that the industry had settled on “feed” as a term for what RSS Digest was handling, and that RSS was no longer the only popular syndication format on the Web. The "Feed Digest" name was born. After building the base technology, the daemon, the crawler, and all of the “techie” bits, we moved to developing the most user-friendly front end we could. The framework of choice was Ruby on Rails, and we think it’s turned out pretty well!