Welcome to Feedeye!

Recent new sets

The Feedeye FAQ

What is Feedeye?

Feedeye is an online feed reading service (sometimes called an “aggregator” or “RSS reader”), much like Bloglines or NewsGator. But Feedeye can do more than just show you your feeds: it’ll also tell you which items on the page are the most important, introduce you to cool new feeds you mightn't have otherwise found, and let you easily browse what other folks are reading.

After you put your feeds into a “set”, Feedeye looks at all of the items in them, groups those that talk about the same thing, and highlights them at the top of the page. This makes it easy to browse the important news in your feeds quickly, a little bit like TechMeme or Google News.

Feedeye also has a bunch of other features, such as the ability to change what your sets look like (to a slideshow, or a newspaper-style page, or a big long page of new items, or a traditional feed reading view with two panels). Unless you mark them as private, anyone can visit your sets or link to them from other Web sites. And Feedeye can help you discover new sets similar to the ones you’re reading.

So what are “feeds”, anyway?

Feeds are a technology to make it easy for you to keep track of new items on a Web site. News services like the BBC provide feeds with their latest headlines, while most blogs provide feeds that contain their most recent posts.

You don’t read feeds directly; instead, you use a “feed reader” that lets you bring lots of feeds together in one place for easy reading. This saves you from checking lots of sites for new items one by one. Feedeye is one example of a feed reader, while others include RSS Owl and Google Reader.

Feeds come in two flavours, “RSS feeds” and “Atom feeds”. Feedeye will handle either without you having to do anything.

For more info, see our introduction to RSS.

How do I use Feedeye?

To use Feedeye, you group your preferred feeds into “sets”, where each set consists of feeds that talk about more or less the same sort of thing. For example, you might choose your favourite world news services and put all of their feeds together into one set. See below for instructions on how to create sets.

Like all feed readers, Feedeye is all about personalising your news experience, so the best way to get started is to find some of your favourite blogs or news sites and putting their feeds into a set that you can browse.

Alternatively, visit the Feedeye home page and take a look at some of the sets other people have been creating. If you click on any user name, you can see a list of sets created by that person, as well as any other sets they may have in their reading list. Unless they are marked as private, you can click to view any of the sets in these lists.

Why are some headlines bigger than others when I view a set?

The main objective of Feedeye is to give you some sense of what’s important among the items in your feeds, rather than just showing all of the items equally as normal feed readers do.

When you view a set, Feedeye processes the entries, grouping together posts that talk about the same thing. The more times a particular topic features in your feeds, the higher it gets ranked when you go to view your sets.

This means that Feedeye provides the traditional function of a newspaper — giving you cues as to what’s important — but lets you choose the sources that determine importance. It’s a bit like creating your own newspaper and appointing your favourite blog authors as its editors.

How do I create sets?

When you’ve found some feeds you’d like to keep track of, your next step is to put them into a set.

First, if you haven’t already done so, log in to your account (or create an account if you don’t have one).

Then just visit the create new set page (you’ll find a link to it near the top of most pages on Feedeye).

Give your new set a name, and then click the “Add new feed” button. Then, type the address of a Web site and click “Add this feed”. Where possible, Feedeye will automatically locate the feed for that site and add it to your new set.

Alternatively, visit the sites you’d like to see in your set (a new browser window or tab may help when doing this), and look for an orange ‘RSS’, ‘Feed’, or ‘Syndicate’ icon. Right-click on this link, copy the URL of the feed to your clipboard, and paste it into the address field, and click “Add this feed”.

Repeat this process until your new set contains the feeds of all of the sites you want to keep an eye on. (Remember that you can always come back to change the feeds later.)

If you’d like, click “display options” to tweak how your set will appear. When you’re done, click “Create this set” and check out your handiwork!

Do I have to log in?

Not to read anything, no. But we recommend you log in anyway, because otherwise Feedeye won’t know who you are, and won’t be able to keep track of what you have or haven’t read. In other words, if you read a set without logging in, then come back later, everything you’ve already read will still appear as unread.

You will have to log in if you want to create or edit sets.

What are “public” sets?

By default, all sets you create are “public”, which means that anyone can go the the URL for your set to see its contents.

Other logged-in users can add your public sets to their reading lists, and the set will be shown in the list on your profile page.

If you make a set “private“ (by unticking the box on the set’s edit page), only you will be able to view the set and it won’t be listed on your profile. This means you won’t be able to view the set if you’re not logged in.

I’ve been using another feed reader. Can I bring my feeds over to Feedeye?

Absolutely — you just need to use something called OPML.

Most feed readers provide a button or menu item called “export OPML’. You need to find this, and save the OPML file that it gives you.

Then, go to Feedeye’s create set form, and hit the “import OPML” tab. Click the Browse button and find the OPML file that you saved from the other feed reader. Then, click “Process OPML” and wait a few moments.

If your feeds in the other reader were split into groups, Feedeye will create one set for each of these groups. Otherwise, you’ll get a new set called Import. (You can edit it later to change the name.)

Can I export my Feedeye sets as OPML?

Most certainly! Simply head over to your profile page (there’s a link to it near the top of most Feedeye pages). There you’ll find a link to an OPML version of all of your sets.

Alternatively, you can get an OPML file for an individual set by viewing it and clicking “edit this set”.

Why shouldn’t I change my user name, or the URL of a set?

Unless you mark your sets as private, anyone can view them by visiting this Web address: http://feedeye.com/<your user name>/<name of set>

Anyone (including you!) can bookmark this address to come back to the set at any time. But if you change your user name, the address of all of your sets will change. Likewise, if you change the URL of a particular set (using the field underneath the set’s name on the edit page), any bookmarks or links to that set will be broken.

So to make sure that people’s links and bookmarks continue to work, we recommend that you don’t change your username, or the URL part of your sets, unless you really need to.

Do you kids have buttons I can put on my site?

Of course! Our fashionable “add to Feedeye” buttons come in three trend-setting styles and will perfectly complement any kind of blog or news page. (Okay, so maybe that’s a slight exaggeration.)

If you want to achieve the same effect without using the buttons, just link to: http://feedeye.com/add/http://your.url.here/feed.xml

Are there limits to how many feeds or sets I can have?

Unfortunately, yes — to keep server loads manageable, this version of Feedeye is limited to 40 feeds per set.

Your account is also limited to creating a maximum of 20 sets.

Can Feedeye speak languages other than English?

The short answer is: sort of, but not really.

You’re welcome to add non-English feeds to your Feedeye sets, and these will be browseable just like any other feed. However, Feedeye’s text processing is currently English-only, so there’ll be no grouping of similar items for those feeds, and they won’t appear in “show related items”.

How often are feeds updated?

We automatically adjust the update interval for feeds based on how often their content is updated — from once every 15 minutes up to once per day for slower-moving blogs.

What if I have more questions? Where can I report bugs?

Simple: just use the feedback page.

Where are your graphics from?

Several parts of the site, including Feedeye’s logo, make use of public domain images from the Open Clip Art Library. We’re particularly grateful for the generosity of Francesco Rollandin and Lumen Design Studio. Our tools of choice are Inkscape and the GIMP.

Who built Feedeye? What technologies does it use?

The electro-vivified beast that is Feedeye was created by Hourann Bosci, with assistance from Daniel Foote, working in their secret lair somewhere in Perth, Australia.

They used an open-source toolkit consisting of KDE (especially Kate), Mozilla Firefox, the Universal Feed Parser (which uses Python), Open Text Summariser, TextCat, PHP, and Perl (particularly PDL).

The beast is given life through hosting on a couple of AMD Opterons running Red Hat Enterprise Linux.