syndic8.com is now measuring feed quality of service

[jeff@vertexdev.com]

Hi Everyone,

I've just brought the "quality of service" aspects of 
syndic8.com online at http://www.syndic8.com/polllist.php

Basically, every feed in the feed list is polled 4 times
per day. The most recent poll is listed at the top. Poll
results will be kept for "a while", probably a week or so.

A record is kept of the overall results of the poll, as 
is the information returned by the feed, or an error 
indication (unable to fetch or unable to parse).

Clicking on any of the links on that page will show you
the list of feeds in that state, and more info about
the fetching or parsing problem. From there, clicking on
the left column (Feed ID) will take you to a detailed
info page for the feed.

This page has a fixed section at the top and a tabbed,
variable section at the bottom. The tabs are: 

* Poll Results - All poll results for this feed.

* Headlines - Headlines for the feed, indexed by poll number.
  Click on the numbers (1/2/3) to go back in time (highest
  number is most recent). Note that this information is
  stored in order to evaluate the quality of the feed,
  and that this is not an end-user headline aggregator.

* XML - This will eventually show the raw XML for the feed.
  Keeping the XML history will enable diagnosis of data-
  dependent issues that come and go -- the infamous
  unescaped ampersands, for example.

* Action Log - List of all operations done for the feed.
  Right now the only action you will see is "Suggest"
  for feeds suggested by users. 

* Notes - This will be user-contributed notes for the feed.

With this work I've completed the majority of the infrastructure
for the evangelization environment. Next on the agenda will
be the mechanism to allow users to review and approve the
feeds. All of the polling and quality of service measurement
work was a necessary prerequisite to this.

I will soon enhance the polling mechanism to automatically
fill in any feed details (site name, description, image 
link, language, and so forth) from the fetched data.

I'd also like to report that we now have 110 registered users
and that they have contributed a total of 1353 feeds. Suffice
it to say that I am blown away by the response to this, given
that it took me 2 years to scrape together 850 or so sources
for Headline Viewer. The future is looking bright.

So thanks for all of your help, sign up for an account if you
have not done so already, and get ready to do some serious
reviewing really soon!

Jeff;