Blending FeedBlendr and Alertbear shows common weaknesscustomer adventures, blogs and podcasting — by TDavid @ 8:27 am PST
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FeedBlendr takes several RSS feeds and blends them into one river of news style feed. I tried importing from my reblog generated OPML file and was greeted with the following message:
Next, I tried saving this file to my desktop and importing from that and received these error messages:
* I couldn’t read the feed at http://www.blog-a-rama.com/wp-rss2.php are you sure that address is correct and it points to an XML/RSS/Atom feed?
* I couldn’t read the feed at http://www.chipstips.com/microblog/rss.php are you sure that address is correct and it points to an XML/RSS/Atom feed?
* I couldn’t read the feed at http://www.psp411.com/xml/psp411_com.xml are you sure that address is correct and it points to an XML/RSS/Atom feed?
* I couldn’t read the feed at http://spreadfirefox.com/community/?q=node/feed are you sure that address is correct and it points to an XML/RSS/Atom feed?
So I removed the 4 RSS feeds FeedBlendr didn’t like and tried to import from the OPML again. This generated the following 160 RSS feeds.
We’re not in Jellystone, Yogi, er, AlertBear
Next, I downloaded Alertbear which runs on the Windows desktop and carries the slogan: “Introduce yourself to the River of News.”
The default feed refresh time is 30 minutes. That wouldn’t do for my mismash of 160 feeds .. have to check every five minutes at least. But here’s the problem … how often does FeedBlendr refresh? If it only refreshes once every 30 minutes then AlertBear would not showing anything for 25 minutes and then 30 minutes have a bunch of feeds.
In my current reblog hourly updates I’m getting anywhere from 20-100 posts averaging about 500-1000 posts per day. It would be nice to be able to filter those down to every 30 minutes, but then it would be easier for me to just change my cron job to poll the feeds that way. Unfortunately that would poll some feeds that only update a couple times a week 48 times a day. Hopefully a future version of reblog will support configurable polling times. It’s a must feature that I haven’t seen many RSS aggregators support.
Note to RSS aggregator developers
Please add in configurable and/or intelligent polling times by feed. And what I mean by intelligent is look at the update times for a subscribed for the last 7 days and average the updates so that polling is sensible.
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Happy to see my feed’s in your OPML — sad to see it failed in FeedBlendr. My RSS is 2.0, validated by the RSS Feed Validator, so I don’t know what could have gone wrong (unless my site was just down at the time).
FeedDemon 2.0 has individually configurable updating. AFAIK it doesn’t adjust the polling based on post stats, though. Even though I dissed FeedDemon before (http://www.chipstips.com/microblog/index.php/post/141/), version 2.0 seems to have fixed the problem with activation and I think I’ll end up registering it.
Comment by Sterling Camden — March 29, 2006 @ 2:57 pm PST
I never did get any updates with AlertBear for this blended feed … my bear must have been off hunting honey. I wouldn’t worry much about it, this was a quick install/uninstall.
Comment by TDavid — March 29, 2006 @ 3:04 pm PST
A future version of Alertbear will spread the updates across the 30 minutes, rather than doing it always on the 30 minute mark. There will also be support for feeds that specify a refresh time.
The truth is though, 160 feeds, Alertbear probably isn’t for you. We’re aiming for the new user, or the user with just a handful of feeds. At 160, things don’t work too well with the river style.
Comment by Richard — March 29, 2006 @ 5:34 pm PST
Thanks for stopping by, Richard. So you are saying if you change the update time in the config to 5 minutes it currently doesn’t do anything every 5 minutes? If so, then no wonder I wasn’t seeing any updates when I knew better.
And actually RoN style feeds works fine with 160 RSS feeds as I use this style every day, every hour, with reblog
See this post for the workflow. It’s something like 500-1000 posts spread over a 24 hour period which is manageable for one person with the workflow I described.
But the key really is polled updating so the program isn’t beating up the publisher’s server that only updates a couple times a week. I realize the hit is very small, but publishers generally don’t like refreshes to feeds more often than once every 30 minutes so a distribution model based on frequency of updates makes good sense.
And lastly, why the feeds above (one of which the publisher indicates above validates) wouldn’t import. You folks can run all the same tests I did here, the data is publically available. Might be a bug in your OPML import code.
Comment by TDavid — March 29, 2006 @ 6:52 pm PST