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Author Archives: Feed Informer

Flickr Support Improved

Hurrah, we now have improved support for Flickr. If you subscribe to any of Flickr’s RSS 2.0 feeds, you can use the ENCLOSUREURL tag to get access to the thumbnails inside the Flickr feeds. We’ve also created a new default template called “Flickr Slides” to help you out. Simply create a digest using a Flickr […]

Paying customers to get their own servers

We’ve come to a decision on how we’re going to organize our infrastructure for the next release of FeedDigest, and we wanted to give you a rough idea of how we see the transition occurring. First off, we’re setting up a beta site that will showcase aspects of our new interface and control panel. It […]

MRSS feeds / Yahoo image feed support added

At a request from users, we now support basic MRSS feeds.. or in layman’s terms, you can now make cool digests like this one based off of, say, Yahoo! Image searches. Simply use the %ENCLOSUREURL% tag in your digest’s template and you’ll get back the URL of the thumbnail image associated with the particular item […]

FeedDigest search system disabled for non subscribers

As you may know, FeedDigest is gearing up for a relaunch and rearchitecture in the next month. One major part of this is that the concept of query and search based feeds is going. They’re impractical to maintain and significantly slow down our systems, disturbing service for everybody. This does not include external feeds which […]

Digest serving speed problem resolved

Users will have noticed that digests were being served rather sluggishly over the past few days. This situation has annoyed us, so we’ve been straight on the case to sort it out. The problem arose because our ‘application server’ deals with a lot of things at once. While 90% of requests are served from our […]

FeedDigest interview available now

Tom Parish recently interviewed me for his Talking Portraits podcast. We talked about FeedDigest, the future of RSS, and related topics. It was fun! Check out the interview! I cover a lot of info about the forthcoming version of FeedDigest, so check it out.

San Francisco and LA in March 2006

I (Peter Cooper, founder of FeedDigest) will be in Los Angeles (and maybe San Francisco) in March 2006. I’m particularly interested in meeting anyone involved in the RSS and Web applications scene. We haven’t decided whether to go to San Francisco or not yet, so if anyone wants to give me a reason to go.. […]

del.icio.us feeds about 24 hours behind

This is out of our hands, but as many people have been asking about it, it seems del.icio.us’s RSS feeds are running about 24 hours behind schedule. del.icio.us often run their RSS server behind the rest of the pack when they’re struggling with capacity, and it seems it’s really behind over the past day or […]

New template tag – COUNTER

Want to number each item in your digest? A few people have asked for this over the past few weeks, so we’ve added a tag to do it. Just edit your digest’s template and include the %COUNTER% tag. It’ll start from 1 and work up to however many posts are in the digest. This isn’t […]

Big performance increases

Some major changes have taken place ‘behind the scenes’ this evening. Our crawling system has moved to a ‘queue’ system for adding new items to our database. This means our database is now a lot faster, and we can crawl several times quicker than before. We implemented the ‘priority’ crawling for paying subscribers mainly because […]