Blendr Blog


Keepin' your feed blending real.

Major Core Upgrades

I’m currently working on some significant core upgrades to FeedBlendr that will also allow the service to start scaling towards some of the other tools that I’m going to be rolling out. These changes affect pretty much everything internally, and will allow me to add a few new features, and to build out the other tools faster>

  • New, standardized Caching framework (that will hopefully not cause more problems!)
  • Improved database connection handling (this will allow me to more easily use slave DBs etc when required)
  • Standardized and centralized “auto-discovery” class for locating feeds
  • Improved and generalized HTTP class, customized to handle everything I need and nothing I don’t
  • Totally separate “format conversion” layer for doing output in Serialized PHP, JS, JSON etc – some cool things can happen here!

I’m really excited about these changes (and some others that I’m still working on). This is the next step in ramping up towards the rest of the Feedville family. Keep an eye on this blog for more info!

Oh — and in response to my previous post about moving to Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud and Simple Storage Service, I got a few questions about my experiences etc, so I’ll be writing up another quick post summarizing it all soon.

9 Responses to “Major Core Upgrades”

  1. benjymous Says:

    Hi, it’s me again – My blend seems to be stale again (nothing new since 7pm two days ago)

  2. benjymous Says:

    *update*

    It’s now displaying posts from yesterday morning, so still stale, but something’s working, somewhere, I guess

  3. beau Says:

    Hey benjymous – thanks for the heads up. I was starting to notice a few issues myself, but then it will update almost randomly, but then fall back behind again.

    I’m looking into what’s causing this. It might be related to the fact that I actually have 2 servers running FeedBlendr now, in a round-robin load balanced configuration.

    I’ll post an update on the blog once I figure out what’s going on (and fix it 🙂

    Thanks.

  4. benjymous Says:

    Thanks

    The two servers thing seems likely – my feed seems to randomly flip-flop between a feed last updated on the 15th and one last updated on the 16th – looks like the two server instances aren’t in sync with each other (or the universe in general!)

  5. beau Says:

    Unfortunately I’m yet to finalize implementation of S3DFS (a distributed filesystem backed by Amazon S3), which would give me the shared cache repository that I wanted to use for multiple servers, but I’m hoping that some of the changes I’ve just rolled out will help.

    Update on that coming momentarily.

  6. FeedBlendr - blending RSS, Atom and RDF feeds into a single river of news! Says:

    […] Keepin’ your feed blending real. « Major Core Upgrades […]

  7. benjymous Says:

    My blend seems to be live again now – thanks

  8. benjymous Says:

    ..although I still get the flip/flop effect when a post appears, and then disappears the next time my reader refreshes the feed, only to have it come back on the following refresh – presumably due to the two instances having different caches – I guess that’s only an issue until you get the filesystem stuff working

    I’ll look forward to reading your write-up of your experiences with S3

  9. beau Says:

    Hmmm – that must be related to the round-robin DNS/multiple caches, although they *should* be handling that internally regardless :-/

    You can read that post here now: http://www.feedblendr.com/blog/2007/05/22/the-trials-and-tribulations-of-using-amazon-ec2-and-s3/