News archive

Apple Spills Juice 2007-09-28 10:39:39

You may have noticed some rather odd listings from Apple over the last few days. We can't explain what's going on, other than the possibility that someone is letting slip some upcoming support for additional iPhone software. They're all unversioned announcements, so it's messing with our shoddy software release parser even worse than those pointless "build" version numbers we've seen popping up recently. We'll leave Apple's wacky listings for now, as ugly as they are, to encourage idle speculation. At least they're all grouped together, making this the only time we can say we're happy they don't change their feed modification times more than once a day.

Length Matters 2007-08-16 18:21:52

There has been an expressed desire for feeds longer than 12 hours, and our current thoughts on the matter is that it can't be done without ads/sponsorship. We understand that in some cases a 1 day or 3 day feed would get you to the next work day or past the weekend, but at some point it just makes more sense to catch up by going to the web site. Keep in mind, too, that our feed retention is already much longer than the sites we aggregate. The main issue is that feeds get loaded so often that making them larger multiplies the load on the server. Someone with Safari set to check our 12 hour feed 24*7 would actually suck down over 4 times as much data if we had a 3 day feed they only checked 24*5! Given how sparingly we show ads on the site, it should come as no surprise that we're not making money on this, and the RSS feed is our ultimate loss leader by being completely ad-free. So if people would be willing to put up with ads in order to get a bigger feed, let us know and we'll try it out if the demand is great enough. We'd also love to hear from anyone willing to directly sponsor a larger feed, which would hopefully result in something less annoying than most ads that randomly get served up.