Yet another feed aggregator…

I like the view of alltop.com because it allows you to scan the feeds very quickly. But I wanted a customizable selection of feeds and so set about writing http://feedsrus.appspot.com/ on Google App Engine.

Thanks to URL Fetch API in google app engine and the Feed Parser library it was really easy to build.

The feed entries are cached in memcache in GAE and refreshed every 30 mins. Because of some limits in the number of cycles a request can use, the current implementation doesn’t scale for more than 9 feeds or so. Planning to fetch 9 at a time and use AJAX to load the rest in bits.

UPDATE: I modified the code to use Google AJAX Feed API and removed the part in the server code where I download the feeds. This means that all the GAE needs to do is maintain the user’s feeds in the data store. And of course, it is fast now.

UPDATE 2:  Feedsrus now has tabs!

Tags: appengine