Feed43 Announcements

Feed43 is back online

2009-09-09T00:29:00.004+04:00

Feed43 is back online and working at max capacity. We did some massive reconfiguration of the server, which lead to the pretty good speed and stability improvements (fingers crossed).

Please report us any issues found.

Server outage status

2009-09-05T17:00:00.002+04:00

Feed43 was (and still) experiencing load problems lately. We are investigating the cause and working on optimizing the server software. Currently, Feed43 is serving paid feeds only to limit the load. We apologize for the inconvenience and will try to recover as soon as possible.

Feed43 engine updated and site localized

2008-08-21T16:11:00.003+04:00

We have updated the version of Feed43 engine to 1.3. The update features two major enhancements:

Feed items now have automatically generated guids, which makes feeds more compatible with various feed readers.
Feed43 web site is now internationalized and almost completely localized into Russian. We plan to finalize Russian localization soon, with more languages to follow.

If you want to help us translating Feed43 into your native language, please contact us. We will be happy to offer gift 'Paid 50' 2-year subscriptions to each volunteer translator.

https:// URLs are now supported

2008-08-05T02:43:00.002+04:00

Feed43 was just updated to understand secure https:// URLs as the source for the feed. In other words, you can now create feeds from secure web pages -- the traffic between the source web site and Feed43 will be encrypted.

Enjoy!

Anyone interested in private Feed43 server?

2008-08-04T11:01:00.003+04:00

I know some of you are using Feed43 quite a lot, and even have our service a part of your business. Just before we phase out our old server that did it job quite well for more than a year under heavy load, I want to know if anyone is interested in having his own 'virtual private Feed43 server'?

This is basically a special server with the same Feed43 engine installed, which will be used for a limited number of customers (up to 5). No new users will be allowed to create accounts on that server, and as a 'VPS' plan user, you will get the following (you can discuss your particular needs and pricing with us):

1000 paid feeds
15 minute update interval
Great performance and responsiveness of the site.

If you are interested, contact us: http://feed43.com/feedback.html

More liberal abuse detection policy, and some tips

2008-08-03T12:06:00.005+04:00

You all know we have a special abuse prevention script that blocks IPs that request feeds way too often, which allows us to reduce load on our server. However some of our customers periodically reported that they were blocked accidentally because of testing the resuting feed in browser. To make less false positives when detecting abuse, we decided to change our policy.

Now we count hits in 24-hour frame (previously we used 6-hour frame):

If you request any of Feed43 feeds for at least 96 times in a 24-hour frame (approx. 1 request per 15 minutes), you will see your IP in 'Banned temporarily' list.
If you request any of Feed43 feeds for at least 720 times in a 24-hour frame (approx. 1 request per 2 minutes), you will be banned permanently.

This means that when testing your feed in browser, you can reload it up to 95 times (4 times more than previously).

As a side note -- if you are testing some script on your web site which is going to pull one of our feeds, we recommend to save the feed XML file locally and test your script with that local static XML file, and only then change the pointer to the real feed on Feed43 server; not doing so is a common oversight which might easily lead to your IP being blocked.

Follow us on Twitter

2008-08-01T03:16:00.001+04:00

You can now follow Feed43 announcements on Twitter: http://twitter.com/Feed43

New server is up and running, engine updated

2008-08-01T03:02:00.002+04:00

Finally, our new server is up and running, and serving free feeds as well. The migration took a bit longer than expected, and we appreciate your patience.

The new server is running as www3.feed43.com currently; as the new DNS values propagate, it will be running as feed43.com (this should be a transparent move).

As a positive note, the new server is running the newer version of Feed43 engine which should be faster and more stable, especially when dealing with Unicode pages and patterns.

Update on migration

2008-07-29T10:25:00.003+04:00

Our new shiny server is in the racks. We'll start deployng Feed43 engine there and migrating database today.

Temporarily serving paid users only

2008-07-27T15:12:00.002+04:00

While we are in the process of moving to a faster server, which can take couple of days, we are currently serving paid users only, to reduce the overall load. We'll keep you updated.

Moving Feed43 to a dedicated server

2008-07-27T00:10:00.002+04:00

Feed43 was experiencing a high load recently; we are currently moving it to a dedicated server. Hope everything will go smoothly.

Access Feed43 feeds via HTTPS

2007-10-30T14:15:00.000+03:00

Since today, you can request Feed43 feeds over the secure connection. All you need is just use the following URL to request your feeds:

https://feed43.com/your_feed_name.xml

This, along with feed password-protection, will allow you to really secure your private feeds. We are likely to restrict this feature to paid feeds eventually, but currently you can use it with every feed.

Note that you can also use entire Feed43 site in secure mode (when creating or editing feeds, sending feedback to us, etc.). Just go to https://feed43.com instead of regular http://feed43.com address.

We are also planning to support https:// in feed source URL soon. Stay tuned.

Problems with broken links on 'Upgrade' page fixed

2007-02-25T17:45:00.000+03:00

Some of our users expected problems with Feed43 'Upgrade' page with broken links. This has been fixed. Just reload the http://feed43.com/upgrade.html page and please welcome to upgrade your Feed43 accounts.

Dealing with search forms that hide full queries from user

2007-02-25T16:04:00.000+03:00

This is the letter from one of Feed43 users:

I'm trying to make a feed off of a page that requires a search first.
It is a job bank and I want certain items defined first - like the type of job
and the county. However, the search results don't give off a unique
URL. Here is the site: http://www.illinoiseducationjobbank.org/IASAScripts/IASA.dll/JobSearch
Any idea how I could get this to work?

The problem with this site is that whatever you want to search, it doesn't show you the full query in browser's address bar, because it uses POST method to transmit data to the server.

Feed43 uses only GET method, i.e. passes all parameters in URL string. Luckily, most servers that use POST method, also accept parameters passed in URL. The rest is simple: you need to peek into POST string transmitted to the server in question and append it to server URL being displayed in your browser. Here comes handy the Firefox browser with Live HTTP Headers plugin installed.

Here is step-by-step solution to customer's request:

Open Firefox browser, choose Tools > Live HTTP Headers and make sure that '[x]Capture' checkbox is enabled.
Switch back to Firefox without closing the Live HTTP Headers window.
Open original search form (http://www.illinoiseducationjobbank.org/JobBank/View.asp) in Firefox browser.
Fill out the form and press 'Search' button.
When you get the results, switch back to Live HTTP Headers window again, scroll down to the end of report and look for a block starting with line: POST /IASAScripts/IASA.dll/JobSearch? HTTP/1.1
At the end of this block you will see actual query line. It will look something like:
PositionType=5&Category=Other+School+Service+Personnel
&County=&Grades=&EmployType=&EmployType=100&SUBMIT=Search
This is what you need. Copy it to clipboard and then append to the URL you see now in FireFox browser. Your full URL will be:
http://www.illinoiseducationjobbank.org/IASAScripts/IASA.dll/JobSearch?PositionType=5&Category=Other+School+Service+Personnel
&County=&Grades=&EmployType=&EmployType=100&SUBMIT=Search
Use this URL in Feed43.

We're back again and serving free feeds

2006-12-12T23:48:00.000+03:00

Feed43 has moved to a new engine two days ago and seems to work well so far (fingers crossed). We are again serving free feeds at full capacity. Please report us any glitches you find.

We will move from www2.feed43.com to shorter feed43.com address within a few days.

More info on service outage

2006-11-15T01:23:00.000+03:00

Current version of Feed43 engine has been written in plain old Perl. As the number of feeds reached 7000+ and we have had several hits per second, our hoster couldn't help but disable the engine script. When we created Feed43 we didn't even imagine it would be so popular despite its "techie-ness" (regular expresions, you know).

We tried our best to make our paid users continue to use this service without interruptions. As a side effect of disabling free feeds they have good times now as their feeds are being processed almost instantly. :)

But we still want to have a free version of Feed43 (this is why we called it so). Now we are busy porting the engine under mod_perl. This is a tough task, but worth doing. Current estimates show that scripts run about ten times faster. This is a good news.

Once we have the engine ported, we will move to a special server that will host Feed43, and launch it for public access again.

Our estimates for completing migration are about 3..4 weeks, if everything goes well. So, take a deep breath and wish us luck. We know you will miss Feed43 during this period.

Notice: we temporarily serve feeds to paid users only

2006-11-11T00:48:00.000+03:00

As more and more people are using Feed43 service, we've run short of server resources again.

As a temporary measure we serve feeds to paid users only.

Free users can still play around with the service and create/modify/preview their feeds, but can't request resulting RSS feeds, until we move to a faster server and optimize our engine for a better performance. Hope you will understand us.

Pretty good and detailed tutorial on setting up a Feed43 feed

2006-07-14T23:43:00.000+04:00

How To: Create a Feed for a Feedless site with Feed43

Paid plans are available

2006-06-16T20:22:00.000+04:00

We have been working hard on our paid services lately. Many of you asked us about paid variant of Feed43 with more news items per feed, more frequent updates, etc.

We listened to all Feed43 users carefully, and tried to make our paid plans adequate. Here they are. See the comparison matrix of available plans and payment options.

Your comments and suggestions, as always, are highly appreciated.

New macros added, bugs fixed

2006-04-23T16:02:00.000+04:00

Now you can use {_} and {|} macros in search patterns:
- {_} is a 'white-space' macro, which matches any sequence of white-space characters including line-breaks, and skips it (doesn't add to search results, i. e. quivalent to {*});
- {|} is a 'line-break' macro, which matches a sequence of line-breaks, and skips it.
White space handling has been fixed.
FAQ and context help has been updated.

'Delete feed' feature added, other minor improvements

2006-04-16T22:31:00.000+04:00

A new 'Delete feed' feature has been added. To delete an unwanted feed, log in to your account, open 'My Feeds' page, click on 'Expand details' for the feed you want to delete and see the 'Delete feed' link in the feed's details. Note that you can later undelete previously deleted feeds via 'Add feeds to your account / Undelete feeds' feature on the same 'My Feeds' page.
Sometimes the login procedure would not work properly (you would see full feeds' details in 'My Feeds' page though at the top of the same page you would see a 'not logged in' message) -- fixed.
Context help and FAQ has been updated.

Feed43 now works with Safari

2006-04-11T23:23:00.000+04:00

Good news for Maс users: Feed43 now correctly works with Safari.

Bugfixes and improvements

2006-03-11T17:49:00.001+03:00

<BASE HREF="..."> tag is now taken into consideration when expanding relative URLs.
URLs without quotes are now expanded and highlighted correctly. Parameters with href=/some/url syntax are now converted to href="/some/url". This will make it easier to build search patterns. However, this change might affect some previously created feeds. If you see some extra quotes around URLs in your feed, please edit your search patterns: instead of writing something like <a href={%}> use the following: <a href="{%}">.
FAQ has been improved.

The publisher viewpoint

2006-03-09T23:13:00.000+03:00

Here's a good and weighed post about Feed43, and life, and everything...
http://www.makeyougohmm.com/20060309/3036/

Compare it with the comments on Scobleizer:
http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/2006/03/08/no-rss-feed43-lets-you-make-your-own/

Yet another one overview of creating a Feed43 feed

2006-03-08T18:30:00.000+03:00

Here is another one step-by-step overview of creating a feed using Feed43 service.
http://www.liewcf.com/blog/archives/2006/03/feed43-reviewed/