Strangely, it took just 1 hour of coding and 2 hours of designing/thinking to implement caching! Had I known this earlier, OrkutFeeds would have never went down.

Anyway I hope service will run smoothly atleast for next few months. I don’t have enough free time to spend more on this free and ad-free (till now atleast) service.

Caching Duration

One bad thing with caching is you won’t get updates from Orkut instantly. But if you have time to follow updates every second, why don’t you just log into Orkut!

Anyway just for info, here are caching duration for different type of feeds.

• Scrapbook feed – 10 minutes
• Topic feed – 30 minutes
• Community feed – 60 minutes

Adjusting these values are fairly easy on our end. So any discussion/suggestion related to these numbers are most welcomed.

As usual, with any change, new bugs may popup over the time. Catch them if you can!

Enjoy…

As posted on our main blog, we have recently shifted to dedicated private servers which cost us a lot. Also as we do not make any money from OrkutFeeds, we can’t let this resource hungry service to burn holes in our pockets.

The only solution which seems good enough now, is to re-code most part of it with exclusive support for caching. That way we can reduce load on our server as well as on Orkut server by 80%. Atleast as per our calculation.

Call for PHP geeks…

If you are a PHP geek and like to volunteer for next version of Orkutfeeds, please contact us.

As we are not making any money from this service as of now, your efforts will not be monetized immediately. But we have plan to make money from this service in future and if you happen to be with us there on timeline, we will surely make you rich!

Sorry once again for downtime. I hope to fix everything within a week.

Till then enjoy updates from our newly launched blog on Orkut – Orkut Diary.

#1. New Orkut URL’s which have /Main# in them were creating problem.

Its completely fixed now.

And we are sure fix will work as long as Orkut don’t do any nasty change!

#2. Many users reported that they were seeing “moved temporarily” in feeds in place of actual content.

I did some thing to fix this as well. I hope you won’t get “moved temporarily”  error anymore.

Some more problems….

Scrapbook feeds may return empty when checking from browser. This will not affect or irritate any user subscribed using some feed-reader as they don’t show empty output!

Reason for this is our bot is doing so much orkutting that orkut can not offer enough donuts to him.

So whenever orkut denied donuts to bot, it returns empty output. This is better than error messages.

Hey wait, did I say it is affecting scrapbook only?? Yep! Community feeds are served by a different bot account now.

Just bear with our poor service for few more days…  we will be adding support for your own account, with lots of other exciting features soon!

Thanks Rupesh for bringing reporting these bugs…

Writing this just to inform you, in case if you notice change in URLs!

If you have bookmarked any our blog post or subscribed to our feed, do not bother much as every link will be redirected transparently to new locations.

I have posted about whole experience on my main blog, Devils Workshop.

Now the bug is fixed completely. So you won’t get more duplicated entries saying something like…

To view this content, upgrade to the latest Flash plugin version at http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer.

I will be fixing few more bugs in coming days. Mostly related to Bad Orkut server error messages.

If you are having any problem with this service, let us know.

Thanks

Just fixed some error and also did some minor changes.

This small changes may result in guid field which uniquly identifies a feed item and so you may find some duplicate contents in your feed reader.

Don’t worry this will be only one time effect and should not result in more than 10 duplicates per feed.

If you find more, please let us know.

Thanks,

OrkutFeed Team

Those who have noticed it, Orkutfeeds was down for last 2-3 days. It took time for me to fix it up as I was busy with some other work.

Sorry for downtime and specially to users who are using Orkut community feeds as during downtime orkutfeeds might have resulted in lots of blank items in their feed reader.

Now all is well and I hope it will remain well in coming days.

I have made some really nice changes to core which will improve speed of this service. At the same time load on Orkut server is reduced by 60-70%.

Also in next week you will some nice features from Orkutfeeds. Also very soon we will allow you to use your Orkut account information.

If you have any idea, suggestion or future request, please visit our feedback forum.

Thanks,

OrkutFeeds Team

His generous donation made possible for me to continue on this project and as a first step, I have integrated a new feedback system courtesy Uservoice.

Now you can post all your feature request, or vote for an existing feature here.

I am taking a week long break from my freelancing work to work on this project. Of course those who read my main blog Devils Workshop, will continue to receive new posts from me.

If you are a PHP programmer and like to contribute on this project, just contact us!

Thanks again Gaurav…

Link: Feedback/Feature Request Page

(p.s. I know the service is down from 2-3 days. I will try to bring it up ASAP!)

Thanks to all of your love, orkutfeeds has been growing quite fast.

There are more than 3000 requests are made from our end to orkut server everyday and with a single google account is doing all the job, we are facing Google’s wrath as I have expected long back. Today I logged into Orkutfeeds bot’ account to see following Google error…

Now what does this mean?

Our bot is hitting limits and Google may soon disable our account. If that happens, I will create a new google account for orkutfeeds bot so that the service will be restored immediately for most of the users. Some user have private scrapbook and they added orkutfeeds bot’ profile in their friend list. If bots’ account get changed, they won’t be able to get updates for few days.

This is last week of my college graduation and I am busy like hell. But I will be free soon and then I will first provide an option to use your account for accessing feeds, of course in secure way. That will mean quality service and no more Google error!

On technical front, I will implement caching on our server so that from our end, load on orkut server will not increase.

Yes I love you Orkut and honestly I have no intension to abuse your servers. I feel very strongly that feeds feature you should have offered long time back.

Rest keep posting your suggestions, problems, complaints for orkutfeeds and sorry once again for all the inconvenience…