Just a quick heads up, a bug that was affecting certain logins has been fixed. This has proven to be a pesky bug to squash since it only affected certain people during certain failed login situations. Anyhow, all better. Let us know if you still see anything weird.
I’ve been working on some internal plumbing stuff on the site and wanted to highlight a few common mistakes I’m seeing when people submit and promote their feeds.
Broken Referral Links
I’ve been looking through our 404 logs and have noticed many people are linking to their feeds with incorrect addresses. Some people have 100′s of broken links to their feeds! That’s a lot of wasted link juice. As the system works, you need to use the exact url that is shown when you visit your feed or what the system returns when you submit your feed. If you are going to take the time to submit your feed and promote it, why wouldn’t you verify the addresses you are promoting?
No Tags
There are still some people that are adding feeds without tags. While this doesn’t affect us(and is a positive for server resources), it surely affects those of you that are adding your feed for exposure. Tags are used for a few purposes:
I hope these tips helped. If you have any questions just let us know!
We have added a new feature to FeedAgg that will boost your AggScore. Simply add an AggScore badge to your site or blog and your AggScore will be boosted by 5 points. You can get the badge code by going to your feeds page in your account or after you submit a new feed the badge code will show on the confirmation page.
When you log into your account and view your feeds page, you’ll now notice we’ve added sharing options to the major social networks including twitter, facebook, delicious, stumbleupon and more. Click a button and you’ll be taken to that services submission page. Try it out and let us know what you think!
We’ve made some changes recently to feed submission rules and I wanted to brief everyone on them.
1. Feeds can have a maximum of 26 50 tags.
2. A max of 50 feeds without an account.
3. A minimum of 50 words in a feed.
4. 100 Max feed submissions in a minute.
We feel these policies will help improve the quality and performance of the feeds we receive.
Feeds can now only have a max of 26 50 tags. While we don’t encourage you to use unrelated feeds, the more related tags you use the more categories your feed will appear in and the more exposure your feeds will get to our visitors.
Due to the level of poor feeds we have been receiving and the inability for us to contact those posters we have now required anyone posting feeds to have verified accounts. When you sign up you will now receive an email that contains an activation link to activate your account.
With this change we have also begun suspending accounts and blocking posts from people who don’t follow our feed guidelines. Please make sure your feeds follow these guidelines, especially the parts about posting feeds with html and other code and feeds that contain the same links and items as your other submitted feeds.
Update 6/22/10: If you are posting over 50 feeds you are required to have an account.
We want to make it is as easy as possible for our publishers to get their content on FeedAgg.com to get exposure and audiences. To help with that we announced the start of a feed posting API almost a year ago. We have since then rewritten it in a more formal restful API interface. Below you will find the basics for using it. Feed content policies still apply. Please give us any feedback, good or bad, on how it works for you.
Background
Feed addition requests can be posted to http://www.feedagg.com/add_feed_api.php. You will receive the response as xml containing either a success code(200) or error code(400′s and 500′s). Successful posts will include the FeedAgg.com url for your feed.
* The API is in a very beta stage and error status codes (ie >200) may change. *
Error codes are 400′s and 500′s. Success codes are 200′s.
A minimum of one tag per feed is required, max 100 50.
Feed submissions via API require a username.
URL Encode your feed urls.
Tags are separated by commas when submitting via API.
Rate limiting still applies. Currently set at 60 submissions per minute.
Updated: 2/10/11
Variables
FeedURL (Required, URL Encoded)
Tags (A minimum of one tag per feed is required, max 100 50.)
UserName (Required)
Example Successful Submission XML Response
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<response>
<status_code>200</status_code>
<status_txt>Your feed, FeedAgg Blog, has been saved.</status_txt>
<data>
<title>FeedAgg Blog</title>
<submitted_url>http://www.feedagg.com/blog/feed/</submitted_url>
<feedagg_url>http://www.feedagg.com/feed/258970/FeedAgg</feedagg_url>
<feedagg_id>258970</feedagg_id>
</data>
</response>
Example PHP(v5.0) Code To Submit VIA API
//---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
// The feedagg.com API address
$url = 'http://www.feedagg.com/add_feed_api.php';
// Set up and execute the curl process
$curl_handle = curl_init();
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_URL, "$url");
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, 2);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
curl_setopt($curl_handle, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "FeedURL=".urlencode('http://www.feedagg.com/blog/feed/')."&Tags=tag1,tag2&UserName=<yourusername>");
$buffer = curl_exec($curl_handle);
curl_close($curl_handle);
// check for success or failure
if (empty($buffer))
{
echo 'message' . "<br>";
}
else
{
echo 'success' . "<br>";
}
//load to xml obj
$xml = simplexml_load_string($buffer);
//sample results
echo "code " . $xml->status_code . "<br>";
echo "message " . $xml->status_txt . "<br>";
echo "title " . $xml->data->title . "<br>";
echo "submitted_url " . $xml->data->submitted_url . "<br>";
echo "feedagg_url " . $xml->data->feedagg_url . "<br>";
echo "feedagg_id " . $xml->data->feedagg_id . "<br>";
Example C# Code To Submit VIA API
Courtesy of one of our users. Thank you!
using System;
using System.Text;
using System.IO;
using System.Web;
using System.Net;
using System.Collections.Specialized;
namespace FeedAggExample
{
public class FeedAgg
{
private const string FeedAggApiUrl = "http://www.feedagg.com/add_feed_api.php";
public static string SubmitFeed(string FeedUrl, string Tags, string Username)
{
//set up the return value
string returnValue = "";
//Create a name value collection to hold the paramaters to be passed in the post
NameValueCollection m_values = new NameValueCollection();
//add all of the specified values
m_values.Add("FeedURL", FeedUrl);
m_values.Add("Tags", Tags);
m_values.Add("UserName", Username);
//encode the paramaters
StringBuilder parameters = new StringBuilder();
for (int i = 0; i < m_values.Count; i++)
{
EncodeAndAddItem(ref parameters, m_values.GetKey(i), m_values[i]);
}
try
{
//set up the request
HttpWebRequest request = null;
Uri uri = new Uri(FeedAggApiUrl);
request = (HttpWebRequest)WebRequest.Create(uri);
request.Method = "POST";
request.ContentType = "application/x-www-form-urlencoded";
request.ContentLength = parameters.ToString().Length;
using (Stream writeStream = request.GetRequestStream())
{
UTF8Encoding encoding = new UTF8Encoding();
byte[] bytes = encoding.GetBytes(parameters.ToString());
writeStream.Write(bytes, 0, bytes.Length);
}
//Set up the response
HttpWebResponse response = (HttpWebResponse)request.GetResponse();
if (response.StatusCode == HttpStatusCode.OK)
{
using (Stream responseStream = response.GetResponseStream())
{
using (StreamReader readStream = new StreamReader(responseStream, Encoding.UTF8))
{
returnValue = readStream.ReadToEnd();
}
}
}
else
{
returnValue = String.Format("Error: There was an error processing the request. The exact error was: {0} {1}", response.StatusCode, response.StatusDescription);
}
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
returnValue = "Exception occured while processing your request. The exception was:" + ex.Message;
}
return returnValue;
}
/// <summary>
/// Encodes an item and ads it to the string.
/// </summary>
/// <param name="baseRequest">The previously encoded data.</param>
/// <param name="dataItem">The data to encode.</param>
/// <returns>A string containing the old data and the previously encoded data.</returns>
private static void EncodeAndAddItem(ref StringBuilder baseRequest, string key, string dataItem)
{
if (baseRequest == null)
{
baseRequest = new StringBuilder();
}
if (baseRequest.Length != 0)
{
baseRequest.Append("&");
}
baseRequest.Append(key);
baseRequest.Append("=");
baseRequest.Append(System.Web.HttpUtility.UrlEncode(dataItem));
}
}
}
Having finally moved the articles pages over to the new design all pages on FeedAgg.com are now using the new theme.
We’ve started taking a harder line on content submissions lately. Specifically feeds that are filled with junk like broken html and javascript and feeds created with rewriting software that create unreadable articles. When submitting feeds, please check and verify how they look on FeedAgg.com. If a majority of your feeds contain these things you better start cleaning them up because we will delete ALL of your feeds when we find them. Likewise, if you find yourself unable to post a feed it’s likely because we’ve already put a block on your account. If you’ve cleaned up your feeds, drop us an email and we’ll look at lifting the block. It doesn’t help us any by having to block you so please just clean up your feeds and we can all move along.