It still is going, almost 10 years since fiddling with some PHP script that converted RSS to javascript (and not even sure if proper credit was given to David Carter-Tod who’s earlier Wytheville News service inspired me) – Feed2JS is still motoring along, made available for free and wide open for making RSS content as easy as cut and paste JavaScript (maybe that is nto so easy?)
It was a little over a year ago, in the middle of my travels, that I got a call that the company who took over the ISP that had donated this site a free home was going to turn the lights out. Getting this on the dedicated server it needed was going to cost me $180 / month. I got a lot of response when I put the red alert warning out and picked up a generous amount of donations, but it was a private supported who wished to remain anonymous that ponied up enough to pay for another year.
PSSSS- if you are interested in supporting us another year, you know where to find me (cough)
A few things going on (or not going on) is that I am not really responsive to some of the feature requests, and there are some odd bugs when feeds have more than one link (the Magpie RSS parser concatenates the urls and messes up things), people are wanting to deal better with enclosures. I’d really be happy if some coders were interested in helping put, I am sure there are improvements that could be made- its been sitting for a while on Google Code but maybe I have to join the Cool Kids on GitHub to find some help? There are limits to what I can do without knowing much how the parser works.
The other thing was we started seeing some outage spikes a few weeks back. Fortunately for me, I got some help from Aaron Axelson, who has kindly donated his server expertise in getting this set up on softlayer.com. This guy, whom I never met, has been a lifesaver for this project, and when I strike oil, I am going to buy a truck full of Dogfish 120 Minute IPA and have it delivered to his house.
Anyhowm, Aaron said the server was getting pounded, more than 1200 concurrent connections at a time. He tinkered and set up something on a free content distribution network at Cloudflare. If I understand correctly, the server is more or less distributed over a cloud network, so the load is spread out. It also does somethings to compress the JavaScript and CSS output (sorry for the guy that was counting lines in the javascript, these newlines are gone). In just one day, the amount of transfer of data saved was incredible:
If I read this correctly, in 24 hours it saved 4,000,000 requests and 8 Gb of bandwidth?? IS this even crazy?
Aaron also wrote of some server optimizations he did (and I have no clue what it means).
So Feed2JS continues to go, 9.5 years in. I could really use some PHP code help with it. Or maybe someone who can build a more modern interface for the web site. And anyone who wants to through some server cash my way? Never refused. I am dedicated to keeping this going and to never charge for the service.
Free to Feed, You and Me!
