Access Feed43 feeds via HTTPS 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.  ¶ 14:15 0 comments links to this post

  Problems with broken links on 'Upgrade' page fixed 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.  ¶ 17:45 0 comments links to this post

  Dealing with search forms that hide full queries from user

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:

1. Open Firefox browser, choose Tools > Live HTTP Headers and make sure that '[x]Capture' checkbox is enabled.
2. Switch back to Firefox without closing the Live HTTP Headers window.
3. Open original search form (http://www.illinoiseducationjobbank.org/JobBank/View.asp) in Firefox browser.
4. Fill out the form and press 'Search' button.
5. 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
6. 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
7. 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
8. Use this URL in Feed43.

  ¶ 16:04 0 comments links to this post

  We're back again and serving free feeds 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.  ¶ 23:48 0 comments links to this post

  More info on service outage 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.  ¶ 01:23 5 comments links to this post

  Notice: we temporarily serve feeds to paid users only 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.  ¶ 00:48 9 comments links to this post

  Pretty good and detailed tutorial on setting up a Feed43 feed How To: Create a Feed for a Feedless site with Feed43  ¶ 23:43 1 comments links to this post