September 24th, 2008 by Jim Spadaccini
Along with looking at Google analytics, Google crawl stats, and other server-based statistics we’ve been tracking RSS Mixer’s Alexa Ranking. The figures we see on Alexa are certainly encouraging, even at this early date. (RSS Mixer has been out there for less than a month.) Yesterday, RSS Mixer was ranked the top 23,527 site in the world on Alexa. With literally hundreds of millions of Websites out there we’re very pleased to see this.
Alexa Rankings are determined by data sent from users who have the Alexa Toolbar and “other diverse traffic data sources.” It is a somewhat imperfect from a statistical point of view–it is not as accurate as server-side statistics. Still, Alexa does provide the ability to roughly compare the popularity of various sites. There’s more about Alexa Rankings on their site.
The other statistical information we have indicates the same strong growth for RSS Mixer. Over the next few months, we’ll see if can be sustained.
Posted in RSS, Web 2.0 Sites, rss mixer | No Comments »
September 16th, 2008 by Jim Spadaccini
Nearly two years ago, I shared a list of 25 NASA podcasts, the complete list at the time. With the release of RSS Mixer and its integrated podcast/media player, I thought it would be worthwhile to get an updated list of NASA podcasts. Bryan Walls who administers a listserv which includes everyone at NASA who podcasts was nice enough to send me the latest. The list contains 59 NASA Podcasts, of which around 75% are active. I’ve created a mix which includes 46 NASA audio and video podcasts.
Along with the embedded media player for this mix (and each individual podcast), RSS Mixer automatically creates an OPML file. With OPML you can take these podcast feeds an import them into any RSS or Podcast reader that supports the standard. Here’s a link to the NASA Podcast OPML file with all 46 feeds. Enjoy.
Posted in Astronomy, Flex, Podcasting, Science, Widgets, mashups, rss mixer | No Comments »
September 11th, 2008 by Jim Spadaccini
The public alpha for RSS Mixer has now been up for a week. The site started out with around 18,000 feeds in the directory. These were added over the last year, since the launch of the initial prototype last summer. The count now stands at 24,000–a relatively large increase for our first week. This total number of feeds translates into nearly 3 million posts in the RSS Mixer directory.
A mention in Mashable! (RSS Mixer Makes Mashup Easier), along with a number of mentions in China (most notably Web Share 2.0) and a post in a Spanish language blog (Geeks Room) among others–helped add nearly 3,000 feeds in just 24 hours. Things have slowed down a bit since, but we are still serving up a lot of pages and supporting an ever-increasing number of widgets and feeds.
When the prototype site went live last year, we were swamped and the site was crushed by spikes in traffic. This time around the structure of the application and the database is much improved. Not only can we handle the load, the time it takes to deliver pages is vastly improved. Take a look at the chart below from Google Crawl stats. This shows how Googlebot (which indexes pages) has spidered the RSS Mixer site over the last 90 days. You’ll notice as the Alpha site replaced the prototype there is a huge spike in activity, as new pages are added to Google. Check out the bottom graph and you’ll see the download time fall off the chart!
This drop-off shows the performance improvement in RSS Mixer. Of course, if we continue to add 6,000 feeds and approximately 750,000 post every week–we’ll have to revisit our site structure in the coming months.
Posted in RSS, Search Engines, Uncategorized, Web 2.0 Sites, rss mixer | No Comments »
September 10th, 2008 by Jim Spadaccini
Tomorrow, myself and Chris Gerber, our top Flex developer will be presenting at the New Mexico Internet Professionals Association’s (NMIPA) monthly meeting. We’re going to discuss Adobe Flex and how we’ve used it in recent projects. For example, the video player on the Open Exhibits Website was created with Flex, as was the Media Player and Web widget for RSS Mixer. We even created a interactive exhibit for NASA using Adobe Flex. (It will be released in October, and we’ll add it to our portfolio, then.) If you’re local, join us. There’s more about the event at the NMIPA website.
Posted in Flex, Papers & Presentations, Widgets | No Comments »
September 8th, 2008 by Jim Spadaccini
Mashable! (the #13 ranked blog in the world, according to Technorati) has just written a very positive article about RSS Mixer. Our launch last week competed with Google’s Chrome release, so it has taken a while for the story to get out there. (The lesson here is never release anything when Google has got something new to share.)
In the article, the writer, Doriano “Paisano” Carta, goes through many of RSS Mixer’s features including; widget output, OPML support, and the Firefox Add-on. After all the work, Ideum has put into the site over the last year, it was nice to see positive comments like this one…
“It is extremely easy to mix and mashup many RSS Feeds in no time at all. The interface is well-designed and helps make the process very simple.”
There’s more at Mashable! see RSSMixer Makes Mashups Easier,
Update: You can listen to the story at Pimp My News!
Posted in RSS, The Web 2.0, Web 2.0 Sites, mashups, rss mixer | No Comments »
