FeedBlendr 2.0 Publically Available
After many months of development (the complete engine was re-written from the ground up!), I’m very happy to announce that FeedBlendr 2.0 is now officially launched and available for use. I’ve mentioned in previous posts all the new features in this version, so I won’t repeat myself, but needless to say it’s a major upgrade.
I’ll be fine-tuning and tweaking over the coming weeks, but hopefully this will be a stable revision to the system and will open up some new options for people who couldn’t use FeedBlendr for something in particular in the past.
One glaring omission in this new version is user accounts, which a lot of you asked for. Rest assured that this feature is coming, but it’s part of a bigger picture, so has been left out intentionally for now to allow me to integrate future features into it better.
Please check it out and let me know how the new version goes!
PS: If you’re into that sort of thing, be sure to check out the new Developers page with information on more powerful ways of interacting with FeedBlendr
March 5th, 2007 at 8:04 am
It’s interesting to see that your own blog (feedblendr.com/blog/) doesn’t have feed auto-discovery tags (rel=”alternate”) 🙂
-abdul
March 5th, 2007 at 11:26 am
Ah – thank you for noticing that. I just upgraded the templates as part of putting the new version live and forgot to include that in the new ones!
I’ve added it in now 🙂
March 5th, 2007 at 12:40 pm
Lovely app!
However, Firefox, IE7, the feed validator and Yahoo! 360° don’t really like my blended RSS feed at http://feedblendr.com/subscribe/11766. This combination of del.icio.us’ RSS feed and Google Reader’s Atom feed seems to be a killer; Yahoo! Pipes hasn’t got the hang of it yet, either.
I’m looking forward to seeing what else FeedBlendr can be used for, apart from boring personal combinations like mine.
March 5th, 2007 at 1:18 pm
I’ve noticed that the browser-integrated readers (e.g. FireFox and IE7’s built in ones) are pretty picky about the feeds that they’ll render in their own format, and in particular they’ll normally not render something if it contains any remotely non-default XML elements (I guess to avoid “losing” information?). This tends to be the case with most feeds produced by FeedBlendr, because of the way that they are compiled and the way that I try to retain as much information as possible from the source feeds.
I’ll have a look at the validator (I assume you mean http://feedvalidator.org/ ?) and see if it’s got some problems that I can fix relatively easily, and I’d never tried any of my output in Yahoo! 360, but it does work in MyYahoo! so that surprises me. I’ll see if I can figure out what’s going on there.
Thanks!
March 6th, 2007 at 3:00 pm
Fantastic application, I’ve been having a great deal of fun with it. I’ve also noticed something odd with a Google Reader feed. I blended my Shared Items feed on its own in order to see whether it would reorganise my dates (it did, great) and whether it would show in the way I wanted in my sandpit blog (ie text rather than script and thus possibly spiderable, check, it did that too).
However when I updated the feed it didn’t update the blend. Not yet anyhow.
thanks again, hope feedback is of use
H
March 6th, 2007 at 3:12 pm
There are a couple different levels of caching involved in the system, so it won’t update immediately (that’d cause too much load on my server unfortunately :), but it should update eventually. The longest you should have to wait is an hour, but please comment here again if it takes longer than that.
Thanks,
Beau
March 13th, 2007 at 12:13 am
Hi Beau. Yes, I was talking about http://feedvalidator.org/.
I’ve had another look, and I’ve found a couple of things: your RSS feed is recognised by Firefox and IE7 if I remove the invalid RSS namespace; and your Atom feed is displayed properly by them if I change the type of the content and summary to “html”, not the incorrect “xml”.
March 15th, 2007 at 7:53 pm
Ahh thank you for identifying that Carey – I’ll be doing some updates to the code base over the weekend and next week, so I’ll make sure that I take care of those issues as well!
Cheers.
March 22nd, 2007 at 5:53 am
My biggest request now would be to have a option to define the max age of a post, or the max number of posts in the resultant feed – some of my sources are ridiculously large, and it seems to make my feed too big for some feed readers :-
March 22nd, 2007 at 5:54 am
Actually, it seems to crash feedblendr with a 500 error
give this a try: http://feedblendr.com/rss/11552
March 22nd, 2007 at 10:27 am
Benjymous, this is a feature that will be coming in future releases (setting the number of entries to allow). It will likely be one of the premium features (there are a lot planned).
As for the crashing – that’s a server problem that I’m looking in to, but if you put a lot of feeds into a single blend then it seems to have problems with running for too long, collecting all the feeds.
Thanks,
Beau
March 25th, 2007 at 5:09 pm
Carey – I’ve fixed those 2 problems you identified in the live version, and I’m nearing completion on a load of new updates that will hopefully improve performance of the new version a bit. I’m hoping to get these other fixes online in the next week.
Beau