New functionality to handle cookies is now available. (It actually went live a couple weeks ago, but took a while to make it to this announcements page).

If you’ve ever tried to parse a page and instead of seeing the website’s content, see an error message about needing to register, or about cookies not being set, the new functionality will help you get around it. You can now pass a cookie along with the URL so that it appears to a website as if you accessed that website from your computer instead of through Ponyfish.

For more information about the functionality, and instructions on how to find the cookie data stored in your browser, visit this FAQ answer.

Starting today, any feeds that haven’t been used in over 30 days will be disabled. The reason behind this is to keep the Ponyfish system running smoothly, without wasting resources on updating feeds that aren’t in use.

Any disabled feeds will still be kept in a user’s account so they can be re-activated at a later date. The feeds will not be updated with new content until they’re re-activated.

If you want to re-activate a feed, simply log in to your account and click the icon to the left of your feed name. To make sure the feed won’t expire again in the feature, just add it to your favorite feed reader.

As before, feeds that haven’t been added to a user account will be permanently deleted if they haven’t been used in 7 days.

New functionality has been launched for premium users to enable you to select metadata from a web page for use in your feed.

By default, Ponyfish will use the title of a link as the title of its corresponding feed item. If the link title is something like “Link to this Post” or “Permalink”, then that’s not very feed-reader friendly. The new metadata functionality will allow you to select alternate text from the web page to use as the title for your feed items.

Similarly, the functionality will allow you to select text that will be placed in the date, description and author fields of the feed items. By default, these fields are left blank.

To use this new functionality, login to the Ponyfish control panel, click on the feed you want to edit, and click on “Assign titles, dates, descriptions and authors”.