I beleive that the mail issues are now resolved so if you have ever sent me a mail and not got a response, please try again.  If you still don’t get a reply then try me on gmail using neil.middleton and I’ll take another look at the server.

As most of you may have worked out - Feed-Squirrel.com is provided to you lot as a free service. I don't charge for my time developing it, I do it off my own back - as many people do with their own projects elsewhere.

Trouble is, my hosting is due for renewal real soon - and I am looking forking out a couple of hundred bucks to pay for this site for another year. For me, this is a lot of money I don't have. Adsense generates some, but not nearly enough to cover the site for a year.

So what can I do about it? Well, the problem stems mainly from Coldfusion. Because of CF, I have to pay nearly double the price of a “normal” hosting account. The options I have are turn the site off (but maintain the blog elsewhere), migrate everything to something like PHP or hope for a hefty donation from someone ;-).

As much as I hate to say it, I don't see how CF can be a success if site's like this are unable to run on a tight budget. Adobe really need to reconsider their licensing model for Coldfusion. If they were to drop the price by 50% - would they sell twice as many licenses though?

I just thought I would post a response to Mossy Blog's “RSS Aggregators are a waste of time” post.

Basically, the theme is that due to the sheer amount of content posted to blogs within the Adobe community, shared with the fact that posters are not always strict about what they post and what categories they share it under, that the usefulness of RSS Aggregators such as Feed-Squirrel, MXNA and FullAsAGoog diminishes.

Well, as the author of one of these aggregators I can see exactly where he is coming from (as well as everyone else in the discussion that was originally on the CFAUSSIE list). So, I thought I would jot down a note describing the features that Feed-Squirrel.com has in place to mitigate these problems. All of these features have been in place since launch or soon after, and the feedback I have received from users has helped develop them significantly. So, here we go:

1) Smart Categories - All of the categories within Feed-Squirrel.com (from the links on the left) should be considered smart, i.e they parse the content for keywords and topics and then decide what category the post should go in. Some posts go in more than one category because of this, some don't go in any, but the net effect is that every thing you see in, say, the CF category, has some sort of relevance to CF.

2) Top Items - Whilst the Digg model is very nice, I felt it was too much for feed-squirrel, as I realised people generally vote for items simply by reading the preview text and then clicking the item to take a look at the whole post. Combining this with item age and a couple of other parameters, Feed-squirrel shows you, all the time, the most popular items over the last 24 hours across the entire dataset.

3) Custom Categories - So, if the last two features still don't filter out enough of the rubbish for you, and you know of a few posters that you trust, you can create a “Custom Category”. You can create as many of these as you like, and include in them only the feeds that you find are of interest. So, for instance, you think Ray Camden and Sean Corfield always say the right things? Then create a custom category for them and filter out everyone else.

As with everything else on feed-squirrel at the moment, none of these features require any sort of registration or login and can be used straight away.

As always though, I am sure that these features do not tick the boxes for every user out there, and never will, but if you think you have an idea which might help this, let me know and I'll see what we can do…

Yup, Feed-squirrel was down all day yesterday due to a network outage at our hosts hostmysite.com. It appears some over zealous builders got carried away and cut the datacenter's connection to the internet.

However, we are back now, and firing on all cylinders.

I've just been going through this months stats for feed-squirrel.com and noticed something which hasn't really made itself obvious before, but the majority of users are CF developers or people with a vested interest in CF.

What I want to know is:
1) Do you use Feed-Squirrel (or even MXNA or Goog)?

2) What do you use it for?

3) What features (not purely related to RSS) would you find useful?

For instance, would a forum (to sit as an alternative to adobe.com) be useful to you? Would a move to focus on CF improve the site for you, or are you a closet Flash developer who loves the Flash content? Is there any information that the site could gather that you would find useful? (e.g .NET content)

Let me know, I can only try and make it better for you…

Yup, the feed-squirrel has been away on his holidays (or vacation to the Americans) and has come back looking fresher than ever.

A few minutes ago the new-look feed-squirrel.com was launched, adding a slightly new layout, and some new functionality designed to make the site better for you, the users.

First off, the sites a little wider now, mainly due to the fact that not many of you seem to use 800×600 anymore, which means I can use the space, and show more at once. To further aid this, and reduce the amount of clicks that a user has to do, we've ditched the item pages, and instead replaced it with an AJAX-y expanding story function. Clicking an item title takes you straight to it, whereas clicking the item text itself pulls in the rest of the item for you to use.

Now, if you are a keen blogger and are aggregated by feed-squirrel.com, you can now get yourself some click reports from the watched feeds page. This will tell you every item feed-squirrel has aggregated, and how many click-throughs each story has had.

So, you're probably thinking that's not much… Well, at the moment you'd be fairly right, unless you look at the back end. Feed-Squirrel.com is now running the latest release of Model-Glue:Unity by Joe Rinehart. This gives us the flexibility to add a whole raft of new features which are waiting in the wings for some free time to come along so I can build them. As these features come along, I'll announce them here.

So, have a play, some bits have changed, most of it's much the same, but now the squirrels wearing a nice new pair of sneakers, and can't wait to try them out….

Feed-Squirrel is currently undergoing a small revamp in order to give you lot (i.e the users) some more useful features. At the same time, I will be looking to improve the existing features.

However, I need to know which bits you like and which bits you don't. For instance, do you like the fact that you can read posts without leaving the site or do you prefer an MXNA style or a digest with a direct link to the source post.

Additionally, for those of you saving posts and creating categories, what would you change about it?

Let me know, and you never know, your suggestions might just make it in to the site with your name credited somewhere on the site…

I've just finished adding a load more feeds to the squirrel's basket. Now feed-squirrel is aggregating approximately 700 feeds from the best minds in the CF, Flex, Flash and Dreamweaver worlds.

But, I don't really want to stop there. I'd like to be adding more categories for you, and more feeds to go with them. Thing is, I need YOU to tell me what you would like to see on the aggregator. If there are any feeds we're missing, or any subjects you'd like to see covered (only constraint is it has to be on the subject of web development) then let me know via the links on the feed-squirrel homepage, or via the comments on this post.

OK, maybe not for everyone, but a few days ago I got playing with Zazzle, an on-line tee store where you can make your own and sell them online.

So, after a few minutes I came up with the following. As far as I know you can buy these in any style, colour and size, and if response is any good, I may just make more.

I love Web 1.0	Eat My Nuts	Don't Panic, I speak fluent geek	Don't Panic, I'm a programmer
“i”

I have just finished migrating the main site's RSS feeds to use FeedBurner. The sole reason being that I can gather statistics on usage, and also to maximise compatability.

So, if you are using one of the RSS feeds, please update the URL that you are reading from.