Strangely, it took just 1 hour of coding and 2 hours of designing/thinking to implement caching! Had I known this earlier, OrkutFeeds would have never went down.

Anyway I hope service will run smoothly atleast for next few months. I don’t have enough free time to spend more on this free and ad-free (till now atleast) service.

Caching Duration

One bad thing with caching is you won’t get updates from Orkut instantly. But if you have time to follow updates every second, why don’t you just log into Orkut!

Anyway just for info, here are caching duration for different type of feeds.

• Scrapbook feed – 10 minutes
• Topic feed – 30 minutes
• Community feed – 60 minutes

Adjusting these values are fairly easy on our end. So any discussion/suggestion related to these numbers are most welcomed.

As usual, with any change, new bugs may popup over the time. Catch them if you can!

Enjoy…

Thanks to all of your love, orkutfeeds has been growing quite fast.

There are more than 3000 requests are made from our end to orkut server everyday and with a single google account is doing all the job, we are facing Google’s wrath as I have expected long back. Today I logged into Orkutfeeds bot’ account to see following Google error…

Now what does this mean?

Our bot is hitting limits and Google may soon disable our account. If that happens, I will create a new google account for orkutfeeds bot so that the service will be restored immediately for most of the users. Some user have private scrapbook and they added orkutfeeds bot’ profile in their friend list. If bots’ account get changed, they won’t be able to get updates for few days.

This is last week of my college graduation and I am busy like hell. But I will be free soon and then I will first provide an option to use your account for accessing feeds, of course in secure way. That will mean quality service and no more Google error!

On technical front, I will implement caching on our server so that from our end, load on orkut server will not increase.

Yes I love you Orkut and honestly I have no intension to abuse your servers. I feel very strongly that feeds feature you should have offered long time back.

Rest keep posting your suggestions, problems, complaints for orkutfeeds and sorry once again for all the inconvenience…

Pavan started it, and then me and many fellow bloggers posted about how MyToday can be used to get scraps on mobile for free.

It seems like being a free service MyToday reached its limitations and they are failing to handle high volume of traffic.

Some users complained that they failed to get SMS in time while some other said they never received any SMS at all!

Tired of answering each of them separately, I have decided to make it clear by a post. So please note that we, orkutfeeds, are not affiliated with MyToday in anyway and can not be held responsible for quality of service they offer.

Our job is only upto serving valid RSS feeds. So if you can see feed content in normal browser we are done. Whatever you do next with other third party services, is beyond our control.

Please do not mistake this with any sort of arrogance. I just want to make clear few things which are affecting us…

Rest you can always contact me if anything goes wrong with our orkutfeeds!

Actually most bloggers covered many details so I was never bothered in first place to write a manual. But for the sake of formality, the user guide is here.

I know documentation means a much longer and boring thing but as of now bear with it. I will write bigger docs in future.

As of now, added a small section – geeky notes, at the end which may be helpful if you are planning to (ab)use orkutfeeds programmatically…

If something needs to be changed, corrected.. please feel free to comment!

Link: User Guide

So what I did is know separated code for all 3 types of feeds viz. scrapbook, community & topic feeds. The major advantage of this separation is increased reliability.  So as an example, if something goes wrong with scrapbook feeds in future hopefully it will not affect community & topic feeds.

Also I made some major changes apart from separating codes. These changes basically to correct minor bugs which pops out whenever orkut makes small changes to their original code. But this will not result in any disruption of service anymore.

Thanks for your patience…

Please let me know if anything breaks again.

Sorry for inconvenience and delay but life is busy like hell here…

There is some problem is session management code which will take more time to figure it out.

I am using SVN here so I am reverting everything to old version where we didn’t have any support for community & topic feeds.

I thought its better than keeping whole service down in maintenance window.

So enjoy only scrapbook feeds for a while…

Once again, Sorry for inconvenience!

p.s. in between I will try to keep up community & topic feeds, but can not guarantee anything till next post!

Sorry all for inconvenience.

Please don’t get annoyed if something goes wrong again. Just contact me via comments/email or anyway as per your convenience.

This is my first project in PHP as well as in public domain so it will take some time for me to fix codes…

I am tried like hell now… so to all commentators, I will post my reply tomorrow!

Sorry again….

Good Night!

Just saw this new issue while leaving my PC. Will fix in it in next 24 hours.

Sorry for inconvenience…