Frequently Asked Questions - Using Your Feed
How often will my feed update?
Your feed will update depending on your account level:
- Paid accounts - every 1-2 hours
- Free accounts - every 4 hours
- Unregistered feeds - every 8 hours
How do I edit my feed?
You must have an account to be able to edit your feed. To edit a feed that's in your account, login, then navigate to "Your Feeds" and click on "Edit" next to the feed you want to modify. You will then be able to modify several aspects of your feed, such as changing the web page URL, feed title, feed description, as well as re-selecting sample links that you want to include in your feed.
Can I remove certain items from my feed?
Yes. Users with paid accounts have access to advanced link functionality under the feed edit options. Link filtering allows you to include or exclude items based on the link title or URL. For example, if your feed is monitoring a forum and you want to exclude items that have the word "advertisement" in the title, this will allow you to do so.
How do I remove session IDs from the links in my feed?
Some websites include session IDs in link URLs which will change every time Ponyfish reads the web page. Several popular message boards fall into this category (e.g., Invision Power Board). You will need to tell Ponyfish to remove these session IDs or else your RSS reader will see each link as a new item every time the feed is updated.
To remove the session IDs, login to your account, click on "Edit" next to the appropriate feed, and select "Remove session IDs from feed links". Check the box next to the session ID variable (usually "session" or "s") and click "Save". If you do not see an option to remove session IDs, please contact support.
Can I publish a feed I create here on my website?
Definitely. Feeds are for sharing.
How do I publish a feed on my website?
All you need to do is put a link on your site using HTML that looks something like:
<a href="http://www.ponyfish.com/feeds/123XYZ"><img src="http://www.ponyfish.com/images/feed.png" /> RSS Feed</a>
You can download RSS feed icons in various sizes and formats at http://www.feedicons.com to use instead of the Ponyfish icon.
It's also recommended that you add the following somewhere in between the <head></head> tags at the top of your page, so that browsers like Firefox, Internet Explorer 7 and Opera can detect the feed:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS Feed" href="http://www.ponyfish.com/feeds/123XYZ" />
Will my feed ever expire?
If you create a feed and don't save it to an account, the feed will expire if it hasn't been read by a feed reader at least once in 7 days. This is done so that valuable server resources aren't spent on updating feeds that aren't being used anymore. If you want to make sure your feed doesn't expire, sign up for a free account and add your feed to the account.
If your feed is saved to an account (free or paid), it will not expire. If the feed hasn't been used in over 30 days it will be automatically de-activated. The feed will still kept in your account in case you choose to re-activate it at a later date, but will not be updated with new content.
Why hasn't my feed changed?
If your feed hasn't changed in a long time, and the page that the feed is generated off of has had new content since the last feed update, there are several possibilities for the problem:
- The web page was inaccessible the last time Ponyfish tried to access it. If it's been less than 24 hours since the last update, then this is the most likely problem.
- The web page URL has changed. Check the URL that's saved in the feed settings and make sure you can access that exact URL in a browser.
- The web page has been redesigned. Go to "modify the link search" under your feed settings. If a list of links isn't picked up, then walk through the process of selecting links that you performed when you first created the feed.
- The link search was too restrictive. Go to "modify the link search" under your feed settings. If some expected links are missing, select them and continue the process that you performed when you first created the feed.
- The link filter is too restrictive. If you setup an advanced link filter, then make sure that items aren't being excluded that you are expecting in your feed.
If none of these suggestions fix the problem, then please contact support.