the FeedTree weblog » Website

Welcome, Slashdotters.

Dan Sandler — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 03:05:01 +0000

Welcome to everyone visiting from Slashdot! The story generated some good discussion, including

FT isn’t BitTorrent (but how they might work together)
why it’s OK that there’s some conceptual overlap with NNTP
a good response to a reasonable question: what’s the problem, exactly?

It wasn’t really the bump in users I was hoping for; at our peak this afternoon we had about 35 nodes, and we’re currently back down to 30 or so. This is still a huge increase from what we had before, and the Scribe trees seem to be operating well. (Those of you subscribed to this feed ought to see a prompt update as soon as this entry is posted!)

The power law is in full effect, judging by my network stats; it appears that there are twice as many users subscribed to Slashdot’s feed as the next most-popular feed, and there are a whole lot of feeds with just one subscriber.

Here’s a little bonus for all the new users out there: a few of those web badges that seem to be so enduringly popular. If you’re pushing RSS or Atom updates via FeedTree, drop in a icon to let your users know they can get faster updates (and save you bandwidth).

Version 0.7.0 released.

Dan Sandler — Mon, 20 Feb 2006 07:37:53 +0000

Version 0.7.0 of the FeedTree software for users and publishers is now available for download. This version collects a number of bug fixes and new features; a complete list of checkins is here. Some highlights:

Proxy: New statistics and info in the web UI (screenshots)
Proxy: Support for conditional HTTP GET for feeds being polled
Proxy: All feeds are now formatted as RSS 2.0 on the client side for better compatibility with feed reading apps (this might be switched back to Atom 1.0 as adoption and toolkit support improve)
Proxy: More robust handling of content feed elements, so that RSS 2.0 fulltext feeds aren’t truncated for proxy users
Publisher: New one-time configuration script, as well as /etc/init.d-style run control scripts for Linux installations
Publisher: New, more flexible format for publisher.conf (based on JSON, see [141])
Publisher: Debian package installation option (see downloads page)

(It is strongly recommended that all current users download the new version; please report any issues to the mailing list or the developers.)

It’s worth noting that the website has received some attention as well; the new FeedTree for users and for publishers pages give a high-level schematic overview of the problems FeedTree solves.

Above: Diagrams from the new introduction pages, inspired by the original FeedTree poster.

Using FeedTree with your favorite feed reader.

Dan Sandler — Thu, 20 Oct 2005 18:18:14 +0000

I’ve added some step-by-step instructions to the FeedTree wiki for configuring various feed readers to use the FeedTree proxy. There’s information for Thunderbird, FeedDemon, Opera, and Mac feed readers. [If you don't see your favorite app here, take some screenshots of the proxy setup process and add them to the wiki.]

FeedTree Poster

Dan Sandler — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 03:42:16 +0000

The poster I designed for the CS department‘s recent Corporate Affiliates meeting is a great brochure-style introduction to the FeedTree project. Print it on a 3-by-4 foot plotter page, or a sheet of letter-sized copy paper. Grab it from the FeedTreePoster page on the wiki.

Live.

Dan Sandler — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 05:22:29 +0000

Welcome to the FeedTree website, launched (very softly) on August 23. On the project wiki you’ll find downloads and documentation for the available FeedTree software. Bug reports and other feedback are invited from all.