zfeeder setup help needed

[bluebrit]

I finally got around to completing a project to add live rss feeds to my website the other day, It's something i've been meaning to do when time allowed and i downloaded a program called zfeeder to do the job. It uploaded fine and the admin worked smoothly and even allowed me too add links but when i tried to run the page all the links showed as errors. I tried everything i could to get it working but nothing worked and i have temporarily deleted it again. Has anyone ever used zfeeder or can someone suggest a better product that does the same job? I tried this initially because its free and has good feedback on it's usuability. I did do a search on this subject on the board but didn't find anything covering the problem, so any suggestions anyone could give me would be appreciated.

[walrus]

I have heard good things about carp although I've never used it.

I use RSS2HTML. No admin and you have to do a seperate php include for each feed but it's very customizable

[ronnie]

Of course the other option would be to use Magpie. But you'd have to code it all yourself.

[bluebrit]

Thanks for the suggestions Walrus, Ronnie. I'll take a look at them and see whats going to work best for me.

[PimpsBlogger]

Zfeeder is the best. It is easy to install and integrate with your code.
Tell me your error then I can help you with zfeeder

[bluebrit]

Hi PimpsBlogger,

Thanks for the reply
At the moment this has to take a back seat for a while so i can get some other projects finished off that need to take priority. If you don't mind though, I may come back to you at a later date with a couple of questions.

regards
bluebrit

[bluebrit]

Ok seems I’m back to this sooner than I thought but the question is slightly different although on topic.

I'll be honest this is all brand new to me so it’s a steep learning curve. If I get any of the terms mixed up here point it out I need to know and thanks for any replies.


Can anyone give me some examples of their bandwidth usage for the rss / blog feeds they run?

I thought rss feeds / blogs, which are pulled mainly from the sponsor (if you used a sponsors feeds) are just a link to their site albeit one that updates more frequently but apparently this may not be the case.

When I had a word with the guys doing my hosting I got this reply when I mentioned I was considering setting up an rss feed, "RSS feeds tend to be fairly resource-intensive and that may be a problem on a shared server" (there was more to the message but nothing that needs to be added here, but I am on a shared server just so you know).

I was under the impression that if you used a sponsors rss feed for example, the bandwidth would be from their end more so than from my server? (ok you’re going to get bandwidth from people going to the site that’s to be expected, but I wouldn't expect more bandwidth from this than a normal html site).

I realize that if necessary a "get function" could basically check if a feed had been updated and if not when aggregators request an update the page would not be reloaded because the feed remained the same, but that too needs some checking. I'm learning now that some aggregators are not too hot and can pull a lot of bandwidth whether a feed is updated or not, hence the initial question.

Oh yes one last thing, I may in the future add a blog of my own to this site which will pull more bandwidth but again that’s to be expected, but how often do you update your blogs on average to make them worthwhile? 2-3 times per week or less? again I’m curious about the server usage and the bandwidth this uses.

regards to all
bluebrit

[walrus]

Originally Posted by bluebrit

Ok seems I’m back to this sooner than I thought but the question is slightly different although on topic.

I'll be honest this is all brand new to me so it’s a steep learning curve. If I get any of the terms mixed up here point it out I need to know and thanks for any replies.


Can anyone give me some examples of their bandwidth usage for the rss / blog feeds they run?

I thought rss feeds / blogs, which are pulled mainly from the sponsor (if you used a sponsors feeds) are just a link to their site albeit one that updates more frequently but apparently this may not be the case.

When I had a word with the guys doing my hosting I got this reply when I mentioned I was considering setting up an rss feed, "RSS feeds tend to be fairly resource-intensive and that may be a problem on a shared server" (there was more to the message but nothing that needs to be added here, but I am on a shared server just so you know).

I was under the impression that if you used a sponsors rss feed for example, the bandwidth would be from their end more so than from my server? (ok you’re going to get bandwidth from people going to the site that’s to be expected, but I wouldn't expect more bandwidth from this than a normal html site).

I realize that if necessary a "get function" could basically check if a feed had been updated and if not when aggregators request an update the page would not be reloaded because the feed remained the same, but that too needs some checking. I'm learning now that some aggregators are not too hot and can pull a lot of bandwidth whether a feed is updated or not, hence the initial question.

Oh yes one last thing, I may in the future add a blog of my own to this site which will pull more bandwidth but again that’s to be expected, but how often do you update your blogs on average to make them worthwhile? 2-3 times per week or less? again I’m curious about the server usage and the bandwidth this uses.

regards to all
bluebrit

I've got a number of blogs running on shared hosting that are RSS fed without any problems. Last month with a little over 28k of uniques and 148k of pages, I used a little over of 10gig in bandwidth. Thats a blog thats probably updated a minimum of 2 times a day from the feeds.

If your not doing any type of caching of the feeds or pulling the feeds in and adding them to a database, I would guess the cpu load might get a bit excessive as you would be pulling all the data from your sponsor every time someone visited your site. But the way most readers work is they pull the complete feed once and then check for updates and only update if a new post is found. My sites check for updates every hour.

I feel that a blog, whether feeds or hand written needs to be updated a minimum of 4 times a week

[bluebrit]

Hi Walrus, Thanks for the reply. I saw your adultbloggingtools.com link, it looks like a great place to learn even more about blogs and rss but is there a newbie area anywhere? Time for more coffee, I see a lot of reading in my future.

regards
bluebrit

[walrus]

Originally Posted by bluebrit

Hi Walrus, Thanks for the reply. I saw your adultbloggingtools.com link, it looks like a great place to learn even more about blogs and rss but is there a newbie area anywhere? Time for more coffee, I see a lot of reading in my future.

regards
bluebrit

I've been thinking about doing a blogging 101 type of thing for ohhhh 6 months or so.

With recent events, adult blogging tools could be seen as a conflict of interest. To prevent any such talk from arising all of my blogging knowledge that I try and export will be done through the board here first.

[Quotealex]

Originally Posted by bluebrit

Hi PimpsBlogger,

Thanks for the reply
At the moment this has to take a back seat for a while so i can get some other projects finished off that need to take priority. If you don't mind though, I may come back to you at a later date with a couple of questions.

regards
bluebrit

bluebrit, have you managed to fix your problem with zfeeder or have you replaced it with another reader?

I've downloaded the script but I'm not sure if I should use it for my next project!

[bluebrit]

Originally Posted by Quotealex

bluebrit, have you managed to fix your problem with zfeeder or have you replaced it with another reader?

I've downloaded the script but I'm not sure if I should use it for my next project!

I should have replied here but pm'd you a day or so back after my return from the UK. Sorry i couldn't help you out, i still haven't had time to get into this myself although it's still on my to do list. If i get time i'll take a look at it again this week and let you know how i get on. it's probably simple but at the moment it doesn't seem to be lol.