Coming soon: super-fast synching in FeedDemon

I spent most of last week at NewsGator's office in Denver, and while I was there I spent some time with Gordon Weakliem. Gordon is the brains behind NewsGator's synchronization API, and he provided some tips that will really speed up FeedDemon's synchronization features.

The way the current beta of FeedDemon 2.0 works, synchronized feeds are downloaded just like non-synched feeds: when it's time to update them, FeedDemon checks each feed for changes. But our sync API makes this unnecessary: instead of downloading every feed, I can just ask NewsGator which feeds have changed since the last update, and then download only those feeds. As you can imagine, this makes updating your feeds a whole lot faster - so much so that even if you don't need to keep your subscriptions synchronized between computers, you'll probably still want to use the sync features to take advantage of the huge speed boost.

Expect to see this enabled in FeedDemon 2.0 Beta 2, which should be out sometime next week.

Update: If you're a developer who uses our sync API, be sure to read Gordon's post about NewsGator API Best Practices.

Comments

[Dan MacTough]

Will this make the synching of read/unread status more complete across computers?

Will it synch flagged status? News bins?

[Gordon Weakliem]

Dan, flag states aren't in the API yet, so we won't be able to synchronize those yet. We'll have it soon, there's a few other things to finish first.

[JS]

Interesting. Question, though: If this is relying on NewsGator to periodically pull posts, and given that smaller sites don't get polled as frequently by NewsGator as larger sites, does this mean that the refresh time would also be greater with the new feature? So, for example, if I post to my blog, the un-synched way queries the site immediately, while the synched way waits until the NewsGator system as polled and caught my new post? Just curious.

[Nick Bradbury]

Dan, this specific change won't address the unread/read synching bugs reported in FD2 beta 1, but these bugs are fixed by a separate change in beta 2.

[Jack Brewster]

JS - There is no differentiation between sites in the polling. The update frequency is approximately one hour for all feeds.

[Thomas Stache]

First thing's first: can't wait for Beta2! I want my FeedDemon fix!

On another note, I never felt the syncing was slow in any way. It surely depends on the usage patterns -- I have FeedDemon sitting around in the background, or minimized to tray -- so I just look up when FeedDemon is ready...

[Nick Bradbury]

That's good to hear, Thomas. I didn't mean to suggest that the synching in beta 1 is slow, though - it's actually quite fast. But beta 2 is much faster :)

[Andrew Herron]

sweet, nice work guys!

[Mladen Mihajlovic]

I can't wait for the flag synching. That's gonna be a great feature. How about posting you ideas on how this will work? Will only new flagged items be synchronised? Will Newsgator store flagged items?

[Bob Archer]

I hope this will work better than the lame way the Newsgator Outlook Edition works.

I want ALL articles/posts/whatever downloaded even if they are marked read on Newsgator Online.

Please don't just pull messages from the last read date from NOL. Or, at least give me the option. I want my db to contain ALL posts on all machines in all software that is synching with my newsgator.

BOb

[Nick Bradbury]

Bob, you'll be happy to hear that one of the other changes in beta 2 is that FeedDemon will download both read and unread articles by default. You can also do this in NG Outlook Edition by turning off the "Retrieve only unread items" setting.

[sp1nfer]

hey, I don't mean to crash this topic but are there going to be any big releases of TopStyle? 4.0 ? If so when?

[Marc]

Tried to purchase feeddemon but the sale procedure crashed after I entered my credit-card numbers. Something with 'processing order' flashing before my eyes for over 10 mins. You better have a talk with these e-sellerate bozo's, no point in developing a product if they botch up the sales, is there?

[Bob Archer]

>You can also do this in NG Outlook Edition by turning off the "Retrieve only unread items" setting.

Nick,

The problem with this is that switch causes NGOE to d/l ALL messages from the feed each time. Which shouldn't be needed. This takes more time and bandwith than it should.

I think the problem is that that NGOE uses the wrong DATE to pull feeds. It should use it's own internal (last updated) date rather than the NGOE (last updated) date.

Anyway, I have reported this to support and three releases have got it wrong. I'm hoping the FD gets this right. I will just have to use it at work too even though it means opening another program.

If you guys want a full use case and steps to duplicate I would be glad to provide it, again.

BOb

[Jack Brewster]

@Marc - The problems with eSellerate are pretty few and far between.

If you'd like, I can contact them to see if they can provide any details on why you had problems ordering. Please send an email to [email protected] and include the email address you were using to place the order.

[Marc]

Ok, thanks Jack. I already sent an e-mail to newsgator. Of course, everything will be taken care of. I shouldn't have posted here but was very frustrated, my apologies.

[Kevin Burton]

Yeah... back in the day when I was planning on shipping NewsMonster 2.0 I was planning on using Rojo to do the checks. NewsMonster would still support doing its own aggregation but this would obviously be MUCH faster.

Another approach is to provide a delta stream directly of all the posts by using NewsGator.

We actually have an API similar to this in TailRank if anyone's interested:

http://tailrank.com/api

[Marc]

(everything sorted out, thanks for super-quick service!)

[Ronnie Gilbertson]

Bob,
We have this item open as a bug with our OL team. (26615)