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Boost your feeds!

Apr 17, 2014 | Pro tips
Boost your feeds!

You can also read this post in Chinese.

Our servers are dealing with millions of feeds like the ones you read every day. We have to have this smart mechanism which balances them and fetches every feed at different interval. This interval is calculated from many factors and is aimed to provide you with the best possible experience without risking our infrastructure.

However you may want certain feeds to update more often, because they are very important to you, you have set rules to alert you for certain topics, or just because they post way too often.

Today we are releasing a new feature which will give you the opportunity to boost those feeds. Boosting means those feeds will update at 10 minute intervals.

To do this you simply need to go to Preferences -> Subscriptions and look for the rocket icon. Clicking on it will enable or disable the polling interval boost. You will notice that there are feeds with “Realtime” update interval. They indicate that the feed is updated in realtime via the PubSubHubbub protocol, so you don’t need to boost them. You are already receiving articles immediately after they are posted from those feeds.

Also (as a bonus :)) if another user is already boosting this feed, you will benefit from the faster updates too!

This feature is available to Pro users, but have some limitations. If you like the feature, you can contact us and “request more”. If you still haven’t tried the many benefits of Pro accounts, you can get a 14 days Free trial.

You can always use the Feed Information dialog to find out how often a certain feed is updated. You can even use the Crawler log to see the actual updates from the last week. There’s also a shortcut in this dialog to the Boost feature.

With this update we hope to address one of the most common drawbacks of cloud-based news readers when compared to stand-alone desktop ones.
There are some other changes in this update:
  • Deactivated feeds can now be used within rules, which means that you can now disable the feeds you use only for rules and keep them away from your subscription tree and unread counters.
  • In Pane View, the titles of articles will no longer be limited to one line. Thanks to our Hungarian translator Zoltán Wacha for his solution.
  • Fixed a bug when opening InoReader from a browser extension which prevented you to use the Mark all as read function until you change the current section.
  • Fixed a bug with the new option to show feed URLs in Preferences -> Subscriptions. Sometimes the option was not obeyed.

Our last two weeks were bit more quiet regarding updates. We were working hard on a serious upgrade to our server architecture. The front-end web servers now have around 5 times the capacity compared to previous week and we also made upgrades to component redundancy to even further decrease the possibility of downtimes. We have used the opportunity to enable Keep-Alive connections in our front-end. They require a lot of additional resources at the web servers, but should deliver better experience over higher latency networks.

We are also aware of an issue which causes some duplicate posts to show up in random feeds. We are still investigating it and will update you when we have a solution.