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/

Feed43 has gone public!

2006-03-08T11:30:00.000+03:00

Feed43 has just gone public!

Invitation codes are not required anymore. Enjoy using Feed43 and don't forget to provide us feedback on the service.

P.S.: We want to thank all our beta testers that helped us much during private beta-testing period.

OPML export added

2006-03-07T22:42:00.000+03:00

As you may know, most feed readers support OPML format to import many feeds at once. Now you can grab list of feeds for any Feed43 user by using the following url syntax:
http://feed43.com/users/user-name/opml

Feed43 + phpBB Fetch All

2006-03-05T18:23:00.000+03:00

Here is a quick tutorial on how to add RSS support for your phpBB forum using Feed43 in conjunction with phpBB 'Fetch All' mod.

I would additionally say that you can also apply Feed43 patterns to your phpBB forum pages directly, but using Fetch All mod (or any other backend mods) is less error-prone.

'User Account' feature added

2006-03-05T17:23:00.000+03:00

Feed43 service now features the ability to create user accounts.

Having created an account, you will be given your personal 'My Feeds' user page
http://feed43.com/users/user-name
where you can view and maintain all your feeds. You can share this page URL with your friends so they could easily view your feeds and add them to their news readers.

When you sign-up for account, provide the e-mail address you used to send feed settings to. This will automatically link all your previously created feeds to this account. You an also add feeds one-by-one from within 'My Feeds' page, or within feed edit form. Note that adding a feed to account will reset it's password to the one your account has. If you want some feed to have a separate password, you can change the password from feed edit form later.

Create your Feed43 account now

Ban43 (Ban For Free)

2006-02-23T13:13:00.000+03:00

Feed43 now features Ban43 (Ban For Free) -- an automatic abuse detection and banning system. This system polls server logs periodically to analyse for abusive user agents/crawlers. The rule is simple:

Request any of Feed43 feeds for 24 times in a 6-hour frame (approx. 1 request per 15 minutes), and your IP will be banned temporarily (for 6 hours).
Request any of Feed43 feeds for 180 times in a 6-hour frame (approx. 1 request per 2 minutes), and your IP will be added to permanent ban list.

Banned IPs are denied access to all Feed43 feeds and feed creation/editing facilities. You can see the list of currently banned IPs here.

You are kindly requested to obey 6-hour poll interval for any of Feed43 feeds.

Good news

2006-02-18T16:56:00.000+03:00

First, we've moved to the new server.

Second, we've recovered from recent problems caused by kind of DOS attack when one of our feeds has been requested every single second by some weird spider. This IP is banned forever, and the owner of this IP should have been already warned by it's hoster.

After some investigation, I have realized that there are some user agents/spiders that do not obey "ttl" parameter of the feeds completely and pull data every 5 minutes or so. This is not a 1-second interval, but nevertheless. To avoid our service lockouts in the future, and to give more air to fellow users that behave nice, I'm planning to create some slashdot-alike automated service to temporarily ban IPs that pollute our service with requests.

Third, I've created a 'CPU protection' feature that tests search patterns against their CPU usage, and recovers from difficult situations gracefully, asking user to refactor search pattern to make it faster (I've added some help on that into context help).

I would like to thank everyone for patience during this incident and want to specially mention Eliot and Blake who donated some money for a faster server. Thank you guys!

We're moving to faster server

2006-02-16T23:42:00.000+03:00

In a few hours as new DNS settings will propagate, Feed43 will switch to new, more powerful server. Until that, old server will still be running, but won't serve feeds and won't let you create new feeds. Thank you for understanding.

Server load problem

2006-02-16T15:45:00.000+03:00

In last two days Feed43 server is experiencing high load (number of feeds served is 700+ already). This caused our hosting company to temporarily disable public access to Feed43 engine, since physical server is shared among many other clients. We're working on this, and hope to re-enable it soon, but Feed43 server needs to be moved to a new more powerful (and more expensive) hosting plan. We ask you for patience.

If you want to help Feed43 and make a small donation, just write us.

Bugfixes

2006-02-07T00:04:00.000+03:00

Fixed a bug with improper ETag calculation under specific circumstances.
Loading web pages which contained \0 ("zero") symbols would result in 'Invalid XML...' error -- fixed.

Added service usage stats

2006-02-04T15:54:00.000+03:00

Feed43 index page now includes a 7-day usage graph (number of active feeds for a given day). It will update once a day.

New feature: Private feeds

2006-02-04T11:58:00.000+03:00

Now you can create private feeds, i.e. protect your feeds with user name and password using HTTP 'Basic' authentication, which is supported by most news readers (desktop and web-based).

This feature is named 'Make this feed private' feature and can be found under Optional features.

You can use 'Send me summary e-mail' option to receive feed settings including your currently defined user name and password.

I must additionally say that if you make your feed private, typed in credentials will be sent each time over the network by HTTP protocol in plain text (pretty insecure). We plan to add HTTPS protocol support in the futute to make your feeds truly private and secure.

Other recent improvements include:

'Delivered by Feed43 service' tagline now appears less frequently depending on the content length of news items.
Feed title and item title are automatically truncated to max. 150 symbols (some news readers don't like too long headings).

Added stylesheet for feeds

2006-02-02T23:59:00.000+03:00

Now if you open any feed in your browser, it will be rendered with a nice stylesheet, so you can read the feed instantly.

Tested in MSIE 6, MSIE 7 and Firefox. Opera is currently not supported. Note that Internet Explorer 7 overrides custom stylesheets and shows feed contents in it's own style.

Added support for ETag

2006-02-01T23:47:00.000+03:00

Added support for ETag/If-None-Match headers in both directions. Now Feed43 is absoultely well-behaved.

Added support for conditional GET

2006-01-31T00:36:00.000+03:00

Added support for conditional GET ("If-Modified-Since" header) when requesting source web pages and when serving RSS feeds.

Does anyone know RSS Aggregators that support all that "If-Modified-Since", "If-None-Match" HTTP stuff to test on?

Bugfixes, improvements

2006-01-29T19:34:00.000+03:00

Feed43 now supports gzip encoding for served webpages and when requesting data from web sites. This will increase the processing speed up to 3..5 times. Gzip encoding is also enabled by default for HTTP/1.1 requests. If your feed reader software can't handle feeds from Feed43, tell us.
Feed43 now correctly expands URLs inside HTML code using the effective URL (the final URL after redirections, if any, from where the HTML content has been received). If any redirections occur, you will see the effective URL in status line upon hitting [Reload] button.
A limit of 200'000 bytes has been set for source HTML pages, because processing of huge documents would lessen overall server performance noticeably. If a source web page exceeds this limit, first 200'000 bytes will be loaded.
Requesting documents from some servers would give a false '500 read timeout' error — fixed.
Fixed a bug when ( ) brackets would render search pattern invalid.

Bugfixes

2006-01-26T22:07:00.000+03:00

Fixed a bug when   and similar entities in search patterns would be screwed up when opening feed edit form next time.
Improved syntax highlighting and html whitespace handling.
Minor improvements in context help.

Bugfixes, improvements

2006-01-25T22:14:00.000+03:00

Empty {%N} parameters would screw up the feed rendering — fixed.
As many of you requested, Global Pattern and Item Pattern fields are now also resizeable.
Relative paths in Feed Link and Item Link are now automatically expanded against base URL of the source web page.

A nice tutorial on Feed43 search patterns

2006-01-25T07:11:00.000+03:00

Here is a good tutorial on how to setup feeds, from one of our users.
http://mgroves.com/blog_archive.php?blogID=164

Digg this article

Getting weather from weather.com as a news feed

2006-01-23T20:53:00.000+03:00

Go to weather.com, search for your city from the Local Weather search pane, then select your city from list of matches. You will see the following page (this is an example for Washington, DC):

And the URL of this page will be something like that:
http://www.weather.com/weather/local/USDC0001?from=search_city (text marked with red will differ for you location).
Create a new feed on Feed43 web site.
In Address field set the following URL: http://www.weather.com/weather/local/USDC0001?from=search_city.
Press [Reload] button.
Set the following Item Search Pattern:
Right Now for{*}On The Spot Weather{*}<TD VALIGN="TOP" colspan="2">{%}<TD COLSPAN="2" ALIGN="LEFT">
Press [Extract] button to see it works (one text snippet will be extracted).
Set 'Local Weather Forecast for Washington, DC - weather.com' as a Feed Title.
Set 'Local Weather Forecast for Washington, DC - weather.com' as a Feed Description.
Set 'Local Weather Forecast for Washington, DC - weather.com' as Item Title Template.
Set {%1}</td></tr></table> as Item Content Template.
Press [Preview] button to see your feed.
Rename feed to something like 'weather-com-washington-dc'.
Don't forget to password-protect your feed so no one could alter it.
Now you can point your aggregator to http://feed43.com/weather-com-washington-dc.xml and see the the feed with single item that will look like that:

Quick tutorial on translating search results from Technorati as a news feed

2006-01-22T22:18:00.000+03:00

Create a new feed on Feed43 web site.
In Address field set the following URL: http://technorati.com/search/test?mini=1 (replace test with actual search term you need).
Press [Reload] button.
Set the following Item Search Pattern:
<h3>{*}href="{%}"{*}>{%}</a>{*}<blockquote{*}<a{*}>{%}</a></p>
Press [Extract] button to see it works.
Set 'Technorati Search / test' as a Feed Title.
Set 'Technorati Search / test' as a Feed Description.
Set {%2} as Item Title Template.
Set {%1} as Item Link Template.
Set {%3} as Item Content Template.
Press [Preview] button to see your feed.
Rename feed to something like 'technorati-search-test'.
Don't forget to password-protect your feed so no one could alter it.
Now you can point your aggregator to http://feed43.com/technorati-search-test.xml and enjoy your life.

We're up and running

2006-01-22T13:12:00.000+03:00

Announcement: Feed43 service is now available for private beta testing. If you want to become a beta-tester, drop us a note.

What is Feed43?
Feed43 (pronounced as "Feed For Free") is an online service, a proxy between your news reader application and third-party web sites that don't support RSS natively. It allows you to create your own news feeds in RSS format for any web site, that is to monitor any web site from within news reader.

Check our site feed43.com for in-depth description of the service and for tutorial on how to create feeds.