Recent Additions to MachiniFeed

May 1, 2008 – 11:24 am

The following are the most recently added ingredients list at MachiniFeed:

  • Pineapple Chunks - The blog of Pineapple Pictures, a machinima / anymation movie company co-founded by Michael R Joyce and Kate Fosk
  • Woolly Boolly - An Electric Sheep Company blog: machinima and beyond
  • Metaverse TV - An internet television channel based in the Metaverse (Second Life), featuring weekly machinima content
  • Machinimad - Machinima from a new perspective
  • How2Machinima - Ian Beckman’s instructive blog, focused primarily on the how-to of World of Warcraft machinima
  • BBlokes IL2 Movie Database - A huge collection of IL2 Forgotten Battles Movies. From fictional to historical. Drama to documentary. Training to tutorials. Find them listed and catalogued for your pleasure
  • Antics Blog - Tell your story - 3D animation for all

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MachiniFeed Stats - What They Mean

April 4, 2008 – 1:02 pm

Some of you might wonder how the Stats line at the top of the MachiniFeed homepage is calculated. Here’s the skinny:

Each time the feed is accessed, be it by web browser, an RSS reader, or a widget on another website, information about where that query is coming from is logged. From those logs, a list of unique subscribers is formulated, including information about the last time they pulled the feed, and a running average of how often they do so.

The Stats displayed on the home page are a count of the subscribers (individuals and website widgets) who have pulled the feed at least once in the past 60 days… thus the term Active Subscribers. And the Average Update Mins is, from those Active Subscribers, the running average of how long they wait in between each download of the feed.

So, for example, at the time of this writing, MachiniFeed has a little over 1000 Active Subscribers, who download a fresh copy of the feed an average of once every 6 to 7 hours.

It’s been interesting to watch this number grow and fluctuate over the past year. Keep spreading the word! Need help adding a MachiniFeed widget to your website or blog? We’d be glad to assist over at the new forum.

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Itty Bitty Tweak

March 26, 2008 – 12:04 pm

MachiniFeed has an adjustable length of the description field in the RSS (by default it’s at 100 characters). I’d been a bit sloppy the first time around, simply performing a hard cut at the character limit. I’ve just applied a little tweak which makes sure a word isn’t cut in two, which should yield slightly cleaner-looking results - especially relevant for those of you who syndicate the feed on your own site. You don’t have to change anything on your end, the feed will update automatically the next time you poll it.

To illustrate, a recent post from Lit Fuse used to look like this:

Usually I don’t write about about non-team topics, but today I think it’s exception time. The great folks over at smooth few films have just released episode 11 of their series “Th […]

Now it will look like this:

Usually I don’t write about about non-team topics, but today I think it’s exception time. The great folks over at smooth few films have just released episode 11 of their series […]

This cleaner truncation will work on any of the variable description lengths you might customize as well.

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Discuss New MachiniFeed Features

March 9, 2008 – 8:37 pm

At the implied suggestion of one of our readers, I’ve set up a forum specifically for MachiniFeed discussion, which you can enter by clicking here or by choosing the appropriate menu item on the right. I’ll be adding links to the MachiniFeed front page as well. We’d love to have you join in the discussion. Registering there gets you access to the new Z-Studios and The Overcast forums all in one.

And to kick things off, I wanted to get your input on a couple new features I’ve been considering for a few months now. The first is a new (and separate) iteration of MachiniFeed which would aggregate the Comments RSS feeds of those Ingredients which have them. That means with one RSS entry in your reader of choice, you could track all blog discussion which spawns from posts in the feed. There are some issues to consider, and your input would be extremely valuable in weighing the merit of the idea as well as thinking about how to overcome some potential problems I can foresee. (forum thread here)

The second idea is a more versatile customization engine, with regard to which ingredients you want in your version of the feed. Allowing Ingredient cherry-picking, if you will. Is it a good idea? And which is the best way to implement it? (forum thread here)

And there are more ideas to come… the best of which are very likely yet to be proposed - by you, the readers who make MachiniFeed worthwhile.

I look forward to hearing from you there.

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Domain Transfer In Progress

January 23, 2008 – 2:46 pm

Phase 2 of the MachiniFeed migration is underway: transfer of the domain name itself.  While I respect the confirmation process as necessary for theft prevention, I think it’s a tad ridiculous how slow that process can be.  I don’t have a technical leg to stand on here, it just seems like it should be faster.

In any case, the transfer is underway, and there is the possibility that the feed will be temporarily interrupted, because I can’t set nameservers or TTL at the destination registrar until the transfer is completed.  I’ll do my best to keep on top of this so I can set them as soon as possible, but a hiccup seems possible if not likely.

Thanks for your ongoing support of MachiniFeed!  Tell your friends!

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Smooth Move for MachiniFeed

January 22, 2008 – 4:12 pm

I’ll bet you didn’t even notice, did you? MachiniFeed switched web hosts, and as far as I can tell, did so without any interruption for feed subscribers. File that under “Things Learned from Doing It Wrong Many Times Before.”

The move was actually a bit more complicated than relocation. The feed was originally set up as ISO-8861 encoding, which from the very beginning created some challenges related to even the most basic of special characters. After consulting with Anthony Bailey on strategy, the feed was migrated as part of the move to a UTF-8 feed, which should have significantly fewer problems with special characters. For one, you should see a lot less rogue question marks in place of single and double quotes, etc.

There have also been a number of recent additions to the feed:

Speaking of which… there are two current feed ingredients with which I’m having a regular problem collecting updates. The connection times out when the script attempts to gather their feeds. Those two feeds are Strange Company and The Moviestorm Development Blog. If anyone can, by chance, help us get to the bottom of why these particular feeds are timing out when all others are updating, it would be greatly appreciated.

The very most recent ingredient is, of course, this blog you’re reading now, which will be used precisely and only for behind-the-scenes updates related to the blend itself. Previously, those updates have been chronicled at Overman’s Blog, but from now on will be found right here.

Cheers!

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