FeedBlendr.com

I am currently looking for someone who is willing to acquire FeedBlendr and take over the operations of the service. It would be up to them whether they kept it publicly-accessible or took the technology and rolled it into part of something else.

Here’s some information if you’re interested in taking over (or just if you like numbers 🙂 )

• Runs from Amazon EC2, so if you’re willing to add additional instances to the pool, it can scale out.
• Currently almost 16,000 blends in the database.
• Those blends are compiled from over 65,000 source feeds.
• In February (short month), FeedBlendr pushed 150 Gig of data “in” and 200 Gig “out”.
• Approximately 50 new blends are created each day.
• According to Compete.com, FeedBlendr gets more than a couple thousand hits a day and growing.
• The site actually sees a couple hundred page impressions per day — the vast majority of requests are for feeds/blends from the system (that’s the point)
• The (MySQL) database is hosted externally (on DreamHost!) but you could move it somewhere else (and I’d recommend that you do)
• DNS is managed from DynDNS, but you could transfer it to anywhere you prefer.

Whoever acquires FeedBlendr will get the following:

1. The domain “feedblendr.com”,
2. All code (PHP) that powers the site including the app itself, WordPress templates, site UI,
3. The database behind the service (including this WordPress-powered blog)
4. Amazon AMI used to host the site (to be moved to your own S3 bucket and changed over to using your credentials),
5. My assistance transferring everything over to your servers/accounts/control,
6. Gratitude from the people using the service (and from me).

If you’re interested, please email beau@feedville.com directly.

I am in the process of moving over to a new set of internal code for FeedBlendr to help with future enhancements, so you might see some funkiness over the next few days (although hopefully not!). The new version introduces a few enhancements, including some slight changes to existing features:

• Internal APIs use Atom-based formats where possible now (OPML stuff is still there where it makes sense tho).
• Added a custom namespace (fv, for FeedVille) to the OPML output, and also some other outputs to provide additional information to users/developers.
• Added some new output format options (look for them on blend information pages soon).
• Added some customization options for output formats for restricting the number of entries displayed and limiting output to headlines only.
• LOTS of internal changes, but those shouldn’t affect you 🙂

Hopefully all servers will be switched over to the new code-base by the end of today, and some new documentation etc will be available to detail these changes.

UPDATE 2007-08-21: This code has been fully deployed on all servers as of 2007-08-17 and appears to be working successfully 🙂

Ouch – I’m an idiot. I only just realized (while testing a new code base for FeedBlendr/Feedville incidentally) that my feed URL was broken 🙁 I accidentally had things configured so that the feed generated out of WordPress (which is what powers this blog) was redirected to FeedBurner so that people would get my burned copy of the feed. Of course FeedBurner was configured to look at that same URL to get the content it was supposed to burn, so it was redirected to itself!

Ahhh endless redirection loops, how we love you. Naaahhhhtt.

It’s fixed now – sorry for depriving you of FeedBlendr News Love!