In my work with Feed Digest, one of the constant limitations is the template system. I want users to have as much control as possible over their digests, and while the existing template system hasn't been bad, it’s far from ideal.
Currently users can give an optional header and footer template and a 'per item' template. […]
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 will […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 where […]
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 […]
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 feed […]
Phew, the database (very large!) has now been migrated to a very powerful machine, a nice dual Pentium 4 stacked up with CPUs and memory. The FeedDigest.com Web site, application, and server daemon are still on a different machine, and database access is being done across a network. The FeedDigest daemon will be moved to […]
