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Author Archives: Feed Informer

Paying users now get preferential crawling

January 4, 2006 – 3:24 am

We’ve just launched an improvement to our feed crawling system where feeds used by digests belonging to higher level users are given a significantly higher priority. This means the regularity of updates should improve significantly for paying users. The amount of ‘extra priority’ goes up by account level, although since the vast majority of Feed […]

Upgrades re-enabled; upgrade today!

January 4, 2006 – 1:01 am

You can now upgrade your account automatically once more. Simply go to your control panel, and on the right hand side you’ll see an Upgrade link. Use this if you want to be able to use FeedDigest without linking back to our site, if you simply want to support us, or if you want the […]

Major performance upgrades go live

December 1, 2005 – 2:05 am

It’s all back-end stuff, but today we made some significant database changes to increase performance and capacity. This meant FeedDigest had to go off the air for two small periods today, so we apologize for the inconvenience. We try not to ever take it down, but the benefits from these changes were too big to […]

Corrupted digests?

November 20, 2005 – 4:14 pm

Some users may have experienced difficulties in updating digests this weekend. We’ve been making some minor architecture upgrades, as well as resolving some issues with our Web server, so if you’ve ended up with corrupted, unworking feeds, then do try rebuilding them as it should all work now. Thanks for your patience.

%TIMEAGO% tag added to templates

November 9, 2005 – 1:37 pm

Thanks to a suggestion by Daniel of Southern Cross Ventures, FeedDigest now has a tag which will tell you how long ago an item’s date was in the past (or on some broken feeds, when in the future!). So, for example, instead of simply listing the date with each item like “20th February, 2005”.. if […]

Mega fixes and mega apologies!

October 27, 2005 – 5:02 pm

We have just experienced one hour of downtime. This was, sadly, unavoidable. Our primary database server reached melting point. Queries were taking a couple of seconds to run.. and that’s fine at low loads, but when millions of requests are being made, it causes some big problems. We want queries to be running in a […]

Upgrades and updates

October 25, 2005 – 11:16 pm

Better limits on free accounts. Free accounts now support mixing of up to five feeds at a time (previously three), and outputting of up to 20 items (previously 15). Faster crawling of feeds. Today we’ve been working hammer and tongs to resolve one of our largest problems, and we’ve done it. We reached a point […]

Moving to nightly builds

October 9, 2005 – 2:16 pm

We’ve begun to get a solid grasp on some of our old infrastructure issues and have been making lots of improvements to our “bottom end” over the past month. Now we want to begin focusing on the true application, the one that you see when you log in, once again. To do this we’re making […]

Listing your latest played songs on your Web site

October 6, 2005 – 1:29 pm

Audioscrobbler/last.fm provides a useful service which tracks which songs you listen to on your PC. It collects this information and uses it to generate statistics about your musical interests. They provide an RSS feed so that you can get a regularly updated record of what you’re listening to, and FeedDigest means you can get this […]

Two bug fixes

October 5, 2005 – 7:22 pm

Nothing exciting this week, but we’ve fixed two bugs which were causing some users a lot of inconvenience: Some ISPs were rejecting our queries for feeds as our requests were slightly malformed. 99.9% of feeds have worked perfectly, but some ISPs have very picky conditions set up to prevent security problems, and such. The FeedDigest […]