Comments on: Blending FeedBlendr and Alertbear shows common weakness

By: TDavid

TDavid — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 23:52:56 +0000

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.

By: Richard

Richard — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 22:34:35 +0000

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.

By: TDavid

TDavid — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 20:04:04 +0000

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.

By: Sterling Camden

Sterling Camden — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 19:57:04 +0000

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.