FeedBlendr.com

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.

Another week, another round of updates and tweaks to the core FeedBlendr service. This week brings:

• Fixed an RDF-parsing problem so that now you’ll get full content of a post if it’s available (was particularly affecting some FeedBurner feeds)
• Added the ability to force re-check a feed URL if it fails (just click the red dot that appears next to it to force check it)
• Fixed a few small things that were preventing feeds from rendering properly in FireFox, so both Atom and RSS versions should work now. Haven’t looked at IE7’s internal feed rendering yet, so I don’t know about that
• Improved the internal caching models to speed things up all over the place
• Switched over to a system that allows parallel outgoing requests for a pretty significant performance increase (especially on larger blends)
• LOADS of small bug fixes and improvements throughout the core code

Growth continues, and I haven’t been kicked off DreamHost just yet (fingers crossed). I’m actually looking in Amazon EC2 to see if that will provide a reasonable option, so hopefully I’ll figure that out in the near future. I’ll keep you posted.

Keep on blending!

UPDATE: Looks like there was a bug in some of the caching that was preventing Blendr from picking up any new feed entries, but I believe it’s fixed now. Thanks to Orlin, Steve and benjy for pointing this out!

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

I’ve (finally) moved the FeedBlendr Blog feed to being served from the wonderful Feedburner, so please update your feed URLs to point to http://feeds.feedburner.com/FeedBlendr. Thanks!

I almost forgot to mention another spiffy new feature that I added with the latest update to FeedBlendr. Now, if you enter the URL to a blog’s homepage and it has auto-discoverable feeds linked from it, then I’ll find them automatically, and use them to blend with.

As you enter a URL and jump to the next one, FeedBlendr will scurry off and go looking for feeds (checks if the URL you entered is a feed, if not, then tries to auto-discover one from there), and then if it finds one, updates that URL. Ahh the wonders of AJAXy goodness.

This should make it a little easier to add the feeds you want just by pasting in the address of the blogs you read.

Enjoy.