Comments on: FoF has failed me

By: Meredith

Meredith — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 17:29:52 +0000

I hadn’t heard of FoF before, thanks for mentioning it. I have tried just about every desktop aggregator I have found, and not liked any of them perfectly. I tried building my own web-based aggregator by using MT plugins and frames, and that wasn’t too good either. I’m currently using Bloglines but I’m not thrilled with it…and yet all the other web-based aggregators aren’t quite what I want, either.

By: Geof F. Morris

Geof F. Morris — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 16:20:25 +0000

I’m with Phil, Mark; I average around 288 feeds aggregated, and I don’t have problems often. When I do, I sometimes can a feed. [I hear Mark Pilgrim crying softly.]

FWIW, Steve is working on getting v0.5 out to beta. [So much for incremental code work, I guess ...]

By: hugo

hugo — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 10:13:54 +0000

Temboz is what I am using. I hacked it a little bit, but mostly to have it run with PostgreSQL instead of SQLite - but there were no technical reasons, just my personal preferrence of PostgreSQL and the nice effect of being able to use the database from multiple running programs.

By: Jeff Minard

Jeff Minard — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 07:15:43 +0000

You may also look into replacing the built in FoF RSS engine. MagpieRSS can be deadly slow in comparison to something like LastRSS - switching engines could alleviate a lot of pain as well - but I don’t know how easy that would be.

Additionally, I think an update for FoF is due out any time now with a slew of improvements.

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 04:52:30 +0000

Hmmm….it MIGHT just be my server and I should have checked on that first. The performance continued to degrade with time, so I never looked into it.
I would love to continue using FoF!

By: Phil Ringnalda

Phil Ringnalda — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 03:46:21 +0000

When I was starting with FoF, the two that people mentioned to me the most were SimpleAggregator and Temboz.

I don’t suppose you’d like the suggestion that you fix whatever’s wrong with your server?

I’m subscribed to 369 feeds, on cheap-ish shared hosting, and an update run seems to take six or seven minutes. Where are you bottlenecking?

By: Graham

Graham — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 03:16:43 +0000

SharpReader.

By: didier

didier — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 03:14:19 +0000

Have you tried gregarius? I use it and so far love it. Functionality is not as extensive as FoF though (I'm a former FoF user), but I keep using it.

By: Craig

Craig — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 03:13:30 +0000

Not sure what cron you’re using to call the FoF update thing, but there are crons out there smart enough to not kick off a process again if it’s not yet done executing. fcron being the one I use. I’ve made a small handful of mods to FoF myself, adding a full-text search to be able to find stuff I remember reading on a feed but don’t remember which one, as well as a couple other things. I can create a patch for you against the base FoF if you’re interested — drop me an email if you are.