Feed43 is back online

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

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

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

1. Feed items now have automatically generated guids, which makes feeds more compatible with various feed readers.
2. 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

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?

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):

1. 1000 paid feeds
2. 15 minute update interval
3. 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

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

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