FeedTools library
I was using FeedTools to generate the RSS and Atom feeds on userstyles.org. Recently, I noticed some major performance problems - while Rails reported the database portion took less than a second, the rendering sometimes took 15 seconds. There wasn’t a huge amount of records - 25 at the most. The problem isn’t so much that 15 seconds is a long time for a feed reader to wait (it is), it’s that it was affecting the performance of the rest of the site. I decided to look elsewhere, and found RXML templates for RSS and Atom. Not only did they take at most a second to render, they’re valid, they’re simpler, and they don’t require a third-party library. Unless you’re parsing feeds, I would recommend avoiding FeedTools.
February 5th, 2007 at 12:42 pm
As the author of FeedTools, I also recommend using the .rxml templates at this point. Getting FeedTools to perform well can be done, but it’s non-trivial and pretty much requires the use of the unreleased code that’s checked into Subversion, and as I’ve more or less abandoned the project, that’s not likely to change any time soon.
February 7th, 2007 at 7:55 am
Bob, it’d be useful if you stated such on FeedTools’s homepage. That would’ve saved me a bunch of time.
February 28th, 2007 at 10:23 am
Hello,
Do you have links to any tutorials for implementing the RXML templates? Thanks.
February 28th, 2007 at 10:28 am
No, I don’t have any tutorials. It’s very straight-forward - just replace what those templates use with actual descriptions, links, and content.