FreeMyFeed

We will be releasing FreeMyFeed version 1.3 soon. There aren’t many differences in feed handling to the new version, but the site should be a little faster, and improved FAQ and contact form.

We expect to push the new release to production before the end of the week (January, 23, 2010).

We are proud to announce that we have just pushed version 1.2 of FreeMyFeed into production. There are several new features of which all are quite important.

New Features:

• Better support for feeds that do not pass validation – Previously if the feed did not pass validation it could not be freed. Now we are a little more lenient. As long as the feed can be validated with the help of Tidy we will allow your feed to be freed. Keep in mind that we will not actually fix the feed, we only use Tidy to relax the validation requirements.
• Error reporting when the feed can not be freed – If your feed cannot be freed you will be apprised of the error that occurred or why the feed cannot be freed.
• If-None-Match and If-Modified-Since support – To reduce the unnecessary overhead of always returning the feed even if the feed had not changed we have added support that many feed readers use, including Google Reader, so if asked, FreeMyFeed will only return the feed if modified since the last change.
• Last-Modified, ETag, and Content-Length headers added – To facilitate the previous feature we needed to add Last-Modified and ETag headers. While we were at it we figured we would play nice and send the Content-Length in the headers so the requesting service or client knows how much data to expect.
• Various interface enhancements – One thing we always like to see in upgrades to a site is always extra eye candy. To improve usability, one thing we added was a loading animation to show that the site is indeed working while trying to ‘free your feed’.

We hope you all enjoy the new features and continue using our service. Please enjoy FreeMyFeed 1.2.

We have been working hard on the next version of FreeMyFeed. We haven’t decided on the version number this will land on due to the large number of new features. Within the next several weeks the new version will be pushed into production.

A small list of new features:

• Feed validation using SimplePie to provide more accurate validation and mime type detection.
• Feed auto location for finding a feed when the parent URL was provided and not the actual feed URL.
• Error reporting via the feed so that you will be notified in your feed reader if there is a problem with your feed.
• Subscription URL to recommend that people use FreeMyFeed to subscribe to your protected feed.

In addition to the features listed above an FAQ is slated for the next release.