System Maintenance – 26 May
Posted: May 21, 2010 Filed under: Maintenance Leave a comment »This is to inform Feedity users that our service provider will be installing the latest security hotfixes on the Web and database servers. These updates are necessary to keep the servers up to date and secure.
The maintenance is scheduled for: Wednesday, May 26, 2010 – 9:00 PM to 2:00 AM Pacific time. The actual downtime will only last approximately 15 to 20 minutes, during which our application will remain off-line and all RSS feeds will be unavailable.
Corporate plan users hosted on separate servers will not be affected by this maintenance outage.
Our apologies for any inconvenience caused.
Top International Web Products of 2009
Posted: December 5, 2009 Filed under: General News 1 Comment »ReadWriteWeb, one of the world’s top 20 blogs, recently published a list of Top 10 International Web Products of 2009. ReadWriteWeb speaks to an intelligent audience of web enthusiasts, early adopters and innovators, and provides analysis of web products and technology trends.
We are glad to share that Feedity received an Honorable Mention in the ReadWriteWeb top list. Feedity is also the only Australian startup to have made it to the list.
Thanks to the ReadWriteWeb team and the international panel of experts who made this list possible. Most of all, thanks to all the Feedity users for their support.
Extract Item Descriptions
Posted: October 27, 2009 Filed under: Service Updates 1 Comment »Back in February 2009, we asked our users and blog readers what new features would they like to see in Feedity. The responses were insightful for us to evaluate the course of value addition for our service users.
The most requested feature was to ‘Extract Feed Item Description’ — the ability to extract description text for each of the news/data items on a webpage. We take pleasure in announcing that after a few weeks of private beta usage, we have released this new feature for our Plus, Business and Corporate plan users. This new feature will allow users to build custom RSS feeds with full summary (of up-to 500 characters for now).
This also makes Feedity the only service to offer a complete RSS feed structure in essence, including the item titles, hyperlinks, descriptions (summary) and publication dates.
Under the hood, we have also fixed a few bugs and improved the performance of the Feedity parser engine.
Please subscribe to our blog feed or follow us on Twitter for future announcements and other service updates.
You can also checkout a lot of cool and popular RSS feeds we have hand-picked in our Featured Feeds section.
How The News Flows
Posted: September 3, 2009 Filed under: Data Mining, General News 2 Comments »Lately, the blogosphere has been echoing with questions over the possibility of a trend that could suggest that RSS is gradually empowering the back-end (server systems) just as well as the front-end (client news readers).
RSS adds tremendous value to the underling information by structuring it in a simple and easily usable format, and I suspect that this trend may just be an indication of the widespread adoption of RSS for server-side applications in the near future. RSS as a standardized content delivery mechanism for interoperability between systems is growing.
Dave Winer, who pioneered the development of blogs and syndication (RSS), recently suggested that RSS is how the news flows:
If all the RSS on the planet were all of a sudden to stop updating (key point) the news would stop flowing. Any news guy or gal who thinks they could get by without RSS — think this through a bit more. We all love the Internet, but don’t shut off your gas and electric because your computer and router wouldn’t work without electricity. Same with RSS and news. RSS is how the news flows, whether you see it or not.
Marshall Kirkpatrick, a lead writer at ReadWriteWeb.com – one of the most widely read technology blogs online, contemplates that if you think RSS is dead then that’s your loss and it’s a big one:
Our team scans over thousands of company RSS feeds each morning for updates (what news writer wouldn’t do that?) and we use an open source customizable meme-tracker to make sure we haven’t missed anything important. We use open source RSS parsing software to set up a dashboard tracking all our competitors’ feeds, we use an RSS to IM alert system to get some feeds sent to us right away and at least some of us use Gmail Webclips for another layer of ambient feed tracking.
In other words, I use RSS all day long. Anyone who is competitive in their field and doesn’t just might be crazy.
The fact is clear, RSS is the backbone of content distribution online.
Server Application Unavailable
Posted: August 28, 2009 Filed under: General News, Maintenance Leave a comment »We are experiencing a problem with our web server, due to which our website is currently not operational. This issue is affecting all user RSS feeds.
We are trying to have the server back online at the earliest. Our apologies for any inconvenience caused.
Please follow this blog post for an update soon.
Update: All services (including all RSS feeds) are up and running now.
Offer for Non-Profits and Bloggers
Posted: August 6, 2009 Filed under: General News Leave a comment »In an ongoing effort to provide the best value, we are pleased to announce a special offer for non-profit organizations and bloggers. Starting today, we will offer a 50% discount to eligible non-profit organizations and bloggers on our Starter and Plus service plans.
Non-Profit Organizations - To be eligible for this offer your organization must have an active website (on your own .ORG domain name) since 1st January 2009 or before. We’ll even waive-off the entire cost ($0 for the first year of use) if your organization happens to be a humanitarian aid agency.
Bloggers - To be eligible for this offer you must be an author of an active blog where you have been contributing since 1st January 2009 or before. We’ll even waive-off the entire cost ($0 for the first year of use) if you write a review about Feedity on your blog.
Please contact us if you wish to avail this limited-time special offer.
Feed Deleted, Purged, or Disabled
Posted: August 5, 2009 Filed under: General News, Service Updates 1 Comment »Some of our users have reported that they received the following message in their feeds:
This RSS feed may have been deleted, purged, or disabled. Please visit Feedity.com to rebuild this feed, or to create more custom RSS feeds.
This message is relayed by our RSS generator when the requested feed is not found on our system. The most common reason for it is that the RSS feed was purged due to inactivity. All free feeds belonging to users without an account (free or paid) are automatically purged from our system after 30 days of inactivity.
However, upon further investigation we have found that for some users without an account, their active free feeds were also purged due to a glitch with our service. We have fixed this issue. Our sincere apologies for any inconvenience caused.
It is highly recommended for all service users without an account to create a free account to start with, and create their feeds under their account. It only takes a few seconds, and creating a free account provides several benefits like: ability to save your feed for refining it later, getting more frequent feed updates, and building more feeds.
