Superfeedr Blog

RSS feeds, like any other type of HTTP web resource have a life of their own and even if they may be behaving as expected at a given point, they are likely to break in the future. As you know, Superfeedr will always notify its subscribers when we encounter a...  

[UPDATE]: Google has now started to return errors when using their feed API. If you’ve reached this place when looking for a replacement, please, read this other article to help you get started with Superfeedr. The Google Feed API is one of the most popular feed APIs. It lets you...  

Our tracking feeds are very powerful: not only they let you subscribe to keywords and boolean expressions, but they also let you subscribe by filtering on meta-data. As you know, each feed processed by superfeedr has a popularity rank, combining several signals. Using this, our tracking feeds can be used...  

The publishing industry is evolving quite quickly these days and several tech giants have recently showed their love of RSS. Facebook’s Instant Articles There’s no doubt that Facebook is the distribution platform for choice with its 1.44 billion users. Recently, they announced a new product: InstantArticles which are aimed at...  

In our effort to provide more meta-data about RSS feeds on the web, today, we’re adding popularity. The popularity of a feed is a good indication of the impact of its stories. When dealing with an information overload it can be interesting to provide hints to your customers about how...  

RSS feeds are very powerful when it comes to aggregation and syndication. One of the main advantages of using a single format is that it becomes very simple to aggregate and combine several of them. Let’s say we have identified 3 RSS feeds which we want to combine in a...  

Last november, we started adding more metadata to the notifications we send: Velocity : the average number of updates a feed yields per day Porn Rank: the likeliness of a feed to be porn Bozo Rank: the likeliness of a feed to be garbage We usually recommend pruning subscriptions using...  

Anyone who’s spent at least 5 minutes looking at Search Engine Optimizations found how crucial backlinks are. In practice for search engines, they’re votes that lets them rank all sites together. In the social web world, people often talk about @mentions, which are ways to link a post or a...  

The request is empty! This is by far the most frequent misunderstanding with PubSubHubbub. They can see the HTTP POST request in their logs, but for some reason, they’re unable to access its content. The reason for this is that most web frameworks and languages assume that POST requests are...  

Last week, we blogged about agregating RSS feeds in a Rails application. Ruby On Rails is one of these frameworks which integrates very well with Superfeedr. However, Rails has a very annoying feature in development: it can only handle one single request at a time. This is annoying because when...