FeedAgg Blog

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.

There hasn’t been a whole lot of news on the blog lately and that’s because the things i’ve been working on haven’t been very obvious in terms of features.  What I have been doing is working under the hood a lot to improve site performance.  When building a website with very few users it’s easy to do simple joins on items or have your your database in 3nf and follow “the rules.”  However once you start scaling up to 10′s of millions of rows in a database those rules no longer apply.  Long story short and without getting into boring details, i’ve made some large strides in site performance that are noticeable to frequent visitors.  Some areas of the site like new feed listings and tag listings have seen 10 – 20 x performance increases. Other areas like the home page and feed pages have seen noticeable increases as well.

Now that i’ve gotten some of these things out of the way i’ll be getting back to adding more features and tools for our users.  If you’ve been poking around your user account you may have already seen hints.  As always, if you have any features or improvements you would like to see just let me know!

I’ve added a couple new features to the user management pages by request.

Feed Name editing – When editing a feed, you can now change the name.

Email Address editing – You can now edit your email address under your info page.

Better Sorting Options – I’ve added some sorting options for feeds under your feed listing page.  I’ll be adding some more in the future.

We’ve had a few site issues today that we are working on.  Everything should be back to normal soon and running faster by tomorrow.  Thanks for your patience.

By popular request, I’ve added a new bulk feed addition form here: http://www.feedagg.com/add_feed_bulk.php

Feeds can be separated by either spaces or commas, just like tags.  These seem like the most common but if you use a different type of separator let me know.

Note: The tags you add will be applied to all the feeds you add through the bulk uploader.

This weekend there were a couple bugs in Twitter posting that were discovered.  I’ve made the changes, and things should be working now.  If you spot any problems let me know!

Wouldn’t it be great if you could update your twitter feed when you update your RSS/XML feed?

We thought so too.

Now when you look at your feeds list you will see a link for “Twitter.” When you click that link you will be taken to the 3 step setup process to integrate into Twitter.  Enter the Twitter username you want to post to, authorize, then finally select your update frequency. From there we will check your feed at the frequency your specify and post any changes to your twitter account.

For those worried about handing over your Twitter password to another web site, worry not, we are using the OAuth protocol to verify against Twitter so you don’t need to give us your Twitter password.

If you haven’t been to your user account control panel in a while you should stop by.  I recently made some pretty significant changes.

1. A new look.  The old look was getting cramped and needed an update.

2. Feed Stats.  A lot of them.  Some of the stats available allow you to see what browsers people are using, what search strings people are using to get to your feed, and then what links people are clicking to leave your page.

3. Twitter Integration. Another post will follow detailing this more.

I’m really hoping that these changes will greatly help our publishers promote their feeds.  Give me some feedback and let me know what you think!

Today I’ve added some new features to your feed management pages:

1. The ability to add tags.
2. The ability to remove tags.
3. The ability to delete feeds.
4. The ability to change feed urls.

Check it out here.