Nursing RSS Graffiti

We’re proud to announce premium subscription add-ons are now available! Optimize your content strategy with analytics and advanced scheduling, or supercharge RSS Graffiti’s publishing speed with the Express add-on. Click on the new “Premium Features” tab in the app dashboard for 14 day FREE trials. For more info, check out our newly redesigned web site: http://www.rssgraffiti.com

The Broadcast add-on is also available, but the 300 posts per page monthly limit will not go into effect until July 1st for existing users.

All subscription plans come packaged with premium email support to assist you in making the most of the service. We hope you like the new look-and-feel of the app, and thanks again for using RSS Graffiti!

-The RSS Graffiti Team

We’re excited to announce the release of some major improvements to the look-and-feel of posts. Image thumbnails are now up to 60% larger. The “share” link on standard-style posts has been upgraded, and will now be translated to your local language. By popular request, the source: link has been removed.

Additionally, there are few changes to get ready for the launch of our premium add-ons. Scheduling options are located by clicking the clock icon at the top of each publishing plan. All post counts have been reset to zero, but from now on, more detailed logging will be available in the stats view.

If you don’t see these changes yet, they should appear on your dashboard in the next few days.

We’d love to hear your feedback! Feel free to drop us a line in our forum with any glowing praise, comments, or concerns. And keep checking the Facebook page for updates on our premium add-ons (coming soon!)

The RSS Graffiti Team

BIG changes are underway at RSS Graffiti. In May, you’ll notice our new look with an updated logo, website and Facebook app page. We’ll be giving away t-shirts to users who take a cool photo of our logo in an interesting location. Check out our Facebook page for updates!

Starting in May, we’ll also be offering two new premium paid features. Although we’ll continue to offer our basic features for free, the new premium features are specifically designed to help boost engagement with your audience, enabling you to deliver content to Facebook with more speed, flexibility, and insight than ever before. In addition, we will limit the number of FREE posts per Facebook target to 300 per month. For high volume publishers who need more than 300 posts per month (that’s 10 posts per day), we’re offering the Broadcast package, which includes up to 2000 posts per Facebook target page for a flat $5 monthly rate. After we officially launch the post limits in May, we’ll include a 30-day grace period for all current users who post more than 300 times per target page each month.

New Premium Features and Post Limit Package:

OPTIMIZE - $50 per month for ALL PUBLISHING PLANS!
Among a million other tasks, you must manage the creation, distribution AND performance of Facebook content. Optimize is designed with you in mind. Our actionable insights provide a visual guide to which content boosts engagement. This knowledge, paired with the new advanced scheduling tool, empowers you to quickly adjust campaigns, boosting engagement and improving the EdgeRank score of your posts.

• 14-day free trial.  Give it a try for FREE!
• Actionable Insights - Graphs, charts, scatter plots and easy to read visual data provide post and page performance data to help improve content performance and engagement
• Pull detailed analytics data (even non-RSS Graffiti data) from the past 90 days
• Advanced Scheduling for time-of-day and day-of-week
• Flat Fee for all publishing plans, pages, and groups you administer
• Includes Premium Email Support

EXPRESS PUBLISHING - $150 per month for unlimited usage
Express Publishing is built for distributing high-priority content like breaking news, important updates, and emergency messaging. Express is a priority lane for publishers who absolutely must push stories from their feed to Facebook in 5 minutes or less. With Express, you can trust that your posts will be updated up to 600% faster than our free 30-minute option.

• 14-day free trial.  Give it a try for FREE.
• VIP post prioritization
• Actual post times may be less than 2 minutes
• Monthly flat fee applies to all publishing plans managed by the account admin
• Includes Premium Email Support

BROADCAST - $5 per per month per Facebook target
Are you a high-volume publisher who uses RSS Graffiti to post more than 300 times a month to a single page? The Broadcast package is for you.

• Up to 2000 posts per Facebook target page per month for $5 bucks
• If you need more than 2000 posts per target per month, contact us and we’ll discuss on a case-by-case basis.
• Includes Premium Email Support

Please follow our blog, Twitter and Facebook page as we reveal more details. If you have questions about the coming changes, please visit our Community Support Forum. Someone from our team is standing by, happy to address any concerns you might have. 

Once again, thank you for using RSS Graffiti and for supporting our small but passionate team.

The RSS Graffiti Team
Blog: http://blog.rssgraffiti.com
Twitter: @rssgraffiti
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/RSS.Graffiti

Thanks for using RSS Graffiti. Customers like you have helped RSS Graffiti grow into the most powerful, flexible, and fully featured application in its class, generating more than a quarter billion impressions each day across hundreds of thousands of Facebook targets.

We want to continue improving RSS Graffiti with features that help our users build an engaged Facebook audience.  To support our ongoing efforts, we’ll be offering two new premium paid features. The new features are specifically designed to help you boost engagement with your audience, delivering content to Facebook with more speed, flexibility, and insight than ever before.

In addition, we will limit the number of FREE posts per Facebook target to 250 per month.  Post bundles after 250 will now be sold in tiers starting at $5 per Facebook target, per month (i.e. up to 500, up to 1500, etc.).  After we officially launch these features in May, we’ll include a 30-day grace period for all current users who post more than 250 times per target page, per month.

The majority of RSS Graffiti users will see NO CHANGE other than additional FREE features and the option to try the premium upgrades. For our high volume users, after the 30-day grace period ends in June, posting will stop after you hit the free 250 monthly post limit per Facebook target, unless you choose to purchase additional post bundles.

It’s important for us to repeat that the vast majority of our users will see NO CHANGE and will be able to continue using RSS Graffiti for FREE. Only those of you who post more than 250 times per month to a single Facebook page, profile or group will be affected by the changes.

Please follow our blog, Twitter and Facebook posts throughout April as we reveal more details, including the premium feature benefits and pricing options. If you have questions about the coming changes, please visit our Community Support Forum. Someone from our team is standing by, happy to address any concerns you might have.

Once again, thank you for using RSS Graffiti. We’re confident that our new premium features will prove valuable, adding robust new capabilities to an application that so many of you have grown to depend on. Thanks for your support!

The RSS Graffiti Team

Blog: http://blog.rssgraffiti.com
Twitter: @RSSGraffiti
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/RSS.Graffiti

Pinterest users!! Did you know RSS Graffiti provides an easy way to automatically publish your pins to Facebook? If you’ve already installed RSS Graffiti, setup is super easy. Just follow the steps below to begin posting your pins right away:

First, open up the publishing plan dashboard and create a new publishing plan. Select your profile or the page you want to use as the target. If you run into trouble, see our getting started guide.

The next step is getting the RSS feed for your Pinterest account. To get a feed of all your pinboards, use this URL for the source: http://pinterest.com/username/feed.rss replacing “username” with your actual username. To only publish pins from one board, use this URL: http://pinterest.com/username/board.rss replacing “board” with the name of the pinboard you’d like to publish. After adding the source URL, select your preferred scheduling options and click save.

That’s all it takes. Switch on the publishing plan, and next time you pin something, RSS Graffiti will automatically push it to Facebook with a beautiful image thumbnail and a link back to your Pinterest page. So easy.

If you need help posting from Pinterest, or using RSS Graffiti in general, please open a thread in our community support forum. Someone from our team will be happy to assist :)

More great news! We no longer require links to be shortened with Bitly. If you’ve never configured custom Bitly shortening, no further action is need. All your links will now be posted to Facebook in their full, unshortened form.

If you’ve previously added a custom Bitly account to track your clicks, shortening will continue to work normally.

Need help? As always, please point your questions to our Community Support Forum: http://getsatisfaction.com/rssgraffiti2

More great news! We now have enhanced support for HTML formatting elements. These tags are now properly rendered:

Horizontal rule:

Ordered lists:

1. January
2. February
3. March

Unordered lists:

• Sushi
• Waffles
• Bacon

And other list types, including roman numeral and dictionary lists.

If you’ve posted something with the new formatting, we’d love to see it. Paste a link in the comments! As always, if you have any questions or need help, please open a thread in our Community Support Forum.

Check back tomorrow for yet another surprise! :D

In addition to a few minor bug fixes, we now support the option to check your feeds less frequently than once per day. You can have RSS Graffiti update your page with content every other day, or only once per week if you prefer. This commonly requested feature allows you to slowly trickle posts onto your wall, timeline or group. Useful if you have a backlog of content and want to keep your page fresh for as long as possible!

This update also includes another often-requested feature: a modest improvement in the “As Soon as Possible” update frequency. RSS Graffiti now publishes new posts more quickly after they’ve been added to a feed.

We hope you appreciate the recent changes! If you have any feedback or need help, please open a thread in our community support forum.

More great features to be announced tomorrow! :)

Recently, Facebook changed the visual appearance of their posts in a way which causes some problems for certain configurations of RSS Graffiti. We’ve been working on a fix to address these issues, and believe we will be ready to roll it out to production on either December 26 or December 27, 2012.

The changes will affect several aspects of the way posting from RSS Graffiti works, so please double check your posts after our deployment to ensure that things are working well for you.

The Facebook changes broke us in several ways:

1. When using the standard post style, if your post does not contain an image, our posts will contain an empty box where the image would normally appear.
2. Also with the standard style, the text from your item’s description will be truncated after only a couple of lines, without any kind of “See More…” link or way to see the rest of the text.
3. In the compact post style, the link to the full story and the source appear in a gray box, but are shifted to the right in a way that isn’t very visually appealing.

To address these issues, we’re planning to do several things differently in the future.

#1 and #3 will simply be fixed. The extra space in both cases will be removed.

However, for #2, we’ve decided to move the description text out of the grey box, and move it up into the text preceding the box. There are several advantages to this:

1. We can include a larger amount of text, and if it’s too long, Facebook will include a “See More…” link allowing you to see the rest.
2. We can support some rudimentary text formatting. In the past, we couldn’t do any formatting at all — which would lead to long, run-on blocks of description text. With these changes, we should be able to honor line breaks appropriately.
3. Most users of RSS Graffiti are trying to drive additional traffic to the original link, and prefer that we automatically truncate text beyond a certain length, which forces the user to follow the link for the full article. Based on this, we’re planning to include a 250-character limit on the description, in order to help drive traffic in the way many of you have requested.

We’re planning to release these changes next week, so if you have comments or questions, please visit the GetSatisfaction thread. You can also find several example pictures with Before/After versions.

In response to user feedback, Twitter sources will be disabled tomorrow, Tuesday 10/16, instead of today’s original deadline. In case you missed the announcement, RSS Graffiti can no longer publish tweets to Facebook due to Twitter’s new API restrictions. This only affects the <2% of users who’ve added Twitter as a publishing source.

Please understand the RSS Graffiti team is still very much dedicated to helping you streamline and automate your social presence, but Twitter’s new policy has left us no legal alternative but to disable this feature. As always, if you have any questions or concerns, please drop us a line in our forum: http://getsatisfaction.com/rssgraffiti2

Big update went out yesterday! This latest release included a number of improvements and bug fixes:

• Live post preview is back! You can once again see how your posts will appear without actually publishing to your page
• Improved look-and-feel of standard style posts when viewed on mobile devices
• Fixed iTunes podcast feeds not being published with correct links
• Fixed issue where some URLs with multiple query parameters were being truncated
• Fixed issue affecting users with multiple identically named targets
• Fixed minor bug in the Twitter hashtag filter
• Various backend performance optimizations

Also, some of you may have received an automated email from us regarding the expiration of RSS Graffiti’s publishing permissions. If you don’t access the RSS Graffiti dashboard for an extended period, the Facebook permission that lets us publish to your page can expire, and posting will cease until you revisit RSS Graffiti. All it takes for you to renew this permission is to open the publishing plan dashboard, so if you receive such an email from us, please don’t ignore it!

If you have any questions about any of these improvements, or the app in general, please open a thread in our community support forum. Remember to include the URL of the Facebook page you are publishing to, and someone from our team will be happy to assist. Thanks again for using RSS Graffiti!

RSS Graffiti is going down for scheduled maintenance Thursday, 21 June 2012 00:00:00 UTC (7PM Wednesday US Central Time). The maintenance will take several hours, during which time the dashboard will be unavailable and all publishing plans will be paused. Once the maintenance is complete, any items not posted by RSS Graffiti during the downtime will start publishing to Facebook. If you have any questions about what to expect, please drop us a line in our support forum.

This past week we rolled out a number of bug fixes and improvements. Here’s a breakdown of recent changes:

• We now support feeds that contain root-relative URLs (URLs which start with a /)
• Resolved an issue with videos from certain feeds not being playable inside Facebook
• The minimum image size for thumbnails has been lowered to 50 pixels. Previously, images had to be at least 59 pixels wide and 59 pixels tall to be attached as a thumbnail
• In response to Facebook removing their embedded mp3 player, we no longer try to add audio attachments to posts. This fixed an issue with duplicate content appearing where the player used to be. (Fear not, podcasters! We’re working on an alternative way to post your audio)
• Various other minor tweaks that improve app efficiency and broaden our support for uncommon feed types

As always, if you have any questions, suggestions, complaints, or praise, please drop us a line in our forum.

Under a new Facebook policy, you must log into RSS Graffiti (or any other app) at least once every 60 days to renew its access to your profile and groups. Unless you visit the app at least this often, its authorization to publish to your profile and groups will expire. The good news is, our contact at Facebook has confirmed that access to pages can still be granted indefinitely, so if you only use RSS Graffiti to publish to pages, visit http://beta.rssgraffiti.com now and hit refresh to automatically grant RSS Graffiti a permanent access token. 

Please understand the security considerations that motivated this change in Facebook’s policies; the new rules will help protect accounts from unwanted intrusion by malicious 3rd party apps. For more info from Facebook regarding the deprecation of permanent permissions, see http://developers.facebook.com/roadmap/offline-access-removal and if you have any questions, concerns, or suggestions about this new policy, please reach out to us via http://getsatisfaction.com/rssgraffiti2

The RSS Graffiti 2.0 servers are now posting more than 20 pieces of content to Facebook every second. Pretty impressive, right? 
Aside from the shiny new UI, version 2.0 should behave almost exactly like 1.9 for the vast majority of users. If you think you’ve found a bug we missed, please let us know! When reporting an issue to our community support forum be sure to mention any errors displayed in your RSS Graffiti activity log, accessed via the bar graph icon at the top right of each publishing plan. Until we integrate version 2.0 into the Facebook application canvas (our next priority), your RSS Graffiti settings can be configured off-site at beta.rssgraffiti.com.
The RSS Graffiti team truly appreciates the support from everyone who has given us feedback during the upgrade process. The best is yet to come!

In response to Facebook rolling out the “enhanced” permissions dialogue (the cause of the “Allow Publishing: Pending” error) to all new pages, starting next week all users will be offered the option to upgrade to RSS Graffiti 2.0, which contains a fix for this problem. The option to upgrade will be accessible in the 1.9 application, and we’ll post another announcement next week when it’s actually deployed.

It is important to note that when you upgrade, any pages or groups you co-administrate will not be configurable by the other admins until they too upgrade to 2.0. Therefore, make sure to communicate with your fellow admins before you make the switch.

Today, we will begin automatically upgrading users to RSS Graffiti 2.0. You will no longer have the option to delay the switch. If you receive an app notification or email from us, it means you and your targets have already been upgraded, and you can configure your publishing settings at http://beta.rssgraffiti.com/

This should come as great news for anyone experiencing the “endless permissions loop” error, as this has been fixed in the new version. It will take a few weeks to get everyone upgraded, so if you’re seeing this error and haven’t yet received an upgrade notice, please be patient! Have any questions, comments or concerns? Open a thread in our community forum at http://getsatisfaction.com/rssgraffiti2 and someone from our team will assist.

Starting this week, users who don’t have any shared targets are being upgraded to 2.0. If you are in this upgrade batch, you’ll be shown the invitation next time you access the app. Please note that the upgrade is no longer optional. From now on, if you have been sent an invite, you will only be able to configure your feeds using beta.rssgraffiti.com

Regarding the permissions-granting issue: Facebook recently began implementing an “enhanced” authorization dialog to about 5-10% of users. The problem was that the main permission we were requesting which allowed us to publish to fan pages was silently not being granted. To resolve this, we had to revise some of our publishing code to use a different permission, which required a few days to complete.

The fix is complete, and 2.0 users should now be able to publish to fan pages without the “endless permissions loop” problem. For those still on 1.9.6, bear with us! We want to be as thorough as possible in the upgrade process to make absolutely sure no one’s publishing is interrupted. We apologize for the delay and appreciate your patience and feedback in helping us resolve this frustrating bug!

Procrastinators! Ready or not, Facebook is switching all pages to timeline tomorrow (March 30th). Since a few of you asked, we want to assure everyone that RSS Graffiti is compatible with timeline, so feel free to make the switch before the deadline. 

Keep in mind posts will be placed on the timeline according to when RSS Graffiti published them, not when they were originally written. If you’ve used the app to publish articles from the past, you may want to manually change the date of these posts in Facebook so they appear at the appropriate point on your timeline. Now get to it!

Regarding the outstanding permission-granting issue: If you are part of the small percentage of users who can’t grant publishing permissions to RSS Graffiti, please be patient while we work on a solution. We’ll make an announcement soon with an update on the status of the fix. -Seth

In February we announced RSS Graffiti 2.0 was going to be rolled out slowly in preparation for a global release. We are happy to report the initial beta period was a success, and so far we have received an overwhelmingly positive response from beta testers using the new version.

This week we will open up RSS Graffiti 2.0 to another batch of existing users, chosen based on how they use the application. At this stage the upgrade will be available on a purely opt-in basis. The purpose of this gradual roll-out is to ensure that everyone’s feeds continue to publish without interruption. Once we are confident these users have been upgraded successfully, a much larger batch of users will be migrated to 2.0. 

We will eventually require all remaining 1.9.6 users to upgrade. It will be worth the wait; RSS Graffiti 2.0 offers improvements that will expand the power and usability of the application. With this release you can expect an increase in speed and greater control over how & where your feeds are published.

Have questions? if you’re already using RSS Graffiti 2.0, we set up a new GetSatisfaction community support forum to help with any 2.0-specific issues you might encounter. Rest assured, we will continue to support users on 1.9.6 until the migration is complete. If you are using 1.9.6, you can always find help on our 1.9 forum.

As Facebook’s deadline for phasing-out App Profile Pages approaches, we are about to migrate RSS Graffiti’s own App Profile Page to our new Fan Page.

The URL of our page will remain the same (http://facebook.com/RSS.Graffiti). Likes will also be migrated automatically so you won’t miss any important updates we will be sending out in the future.

This makes it the last post to appear on our old App Profile Page then! See you all, on our new Fan Page! Thanks to everyone for all the discussions and feedback we had on our App Profile’s wall and thanks for all the great reviews you’ve given us!

P.S: To migrate our feeds, we will be using our own new little migration feature, so if you are an App admin and didn’t do your migration yet, then you might want to try it.

Facebook has recently announced that they are going to be removing App Profile Pages by February 1st, 2012. If you administer a Facebook Application, this is important news for you and probably you already know about this for several days or weeks now. If you need more info on this then you can look at Facebook’s own post here.

Now, we know that many of you use RSS Graffiti to publish your feeds on your App Profile Pages. Assuming that you are planning to create a new Fan Page to replace your old App Profile Page (many of you probably already did that), we thought it would be nice if we could lend you a helping hand (especially those last-minute-type-of-admins that need to hurry-up to meet the Feb 1st Facebook deadline). So we’ve put together a nice little utility option in RSS Graffiti to help you make the switch.

Here is how it works:

Let’s say you have a Facebook App called “Super App”. Let’s also say that you just created a new Fan Page named “Super App Fan Page” and assigned it to the Brand/App category. Finally, let’s say that you got 4 feeds added to your “Super App” App Profile Page in RSS Graffiti. Now you want to move those 4 feeds, out of the App Profile Page and into your new “Super App Fan Page”, so that your fans continue to get your news after you make the switch. But you don’t want to re-enter them in RSS Graffiti one by one. You’d love to just click a button, move them all over and be done with it.

To move the feeds without having to re-create every feed manually, you can now go to RSS Graffiti and select either your “Super App” App Profile Page or your “Super App Fan Page”. RSS Graffiti will -sort of magically- detect that you intend to move the feeds from the App Profile to the Fan Page and offer to do it for you.

The message it gives you is pretty self-explanatory for a Facebook App admin so there is not much point in explaining more here. It’s a yellow box that appears before your feeds. Your can’t miss it. If you have questions or doubts don’t hesitate to ask either in the comments of this post or (preferably) in our user support forum on GetSatisfaction.

Some words of caution: As soon as you click on the Migrate Button and confirm the operation on the pop-up dialog that will appear, your feeds will be removed from the App Profile Page immediately and will be added to your new Fan Page. RSS Graffiti will then start publishing them on your new Fan Page. We don’t provide you with a way to move them back to the App Profile Page. So only do it when you are ready for it.

For those who care about detail, here is a bit more on how we match Apps to Fan Pages:

If you navigate to the settings of a Fan Page in RSS Graffiti, then the app will check if the Fan Page is of the proper “Brand/App” category as required by Facebook. If it is, it will then look for any App Profile Pages that you own, which have a similar name with your Fan Page. If it finds at least one App Profile with a similar name, that also has at least one feed added in it, then RSS Graffiti will prompt you to move the feed(s) from one of your relevant App Profiles to the Fan Page.

Similarly if you navigate to an App Profile Page in RSS Graffiti, then the app will check if you also have any Fan Pages of the “Brand/App” category that have a similar name with your Application. If it finds any, it will prompt you to move your feeds there.

We hope this helps! We’ll migrate our own App Profile Page this way in a few days too…

The issue that has been reported earlier today, causing posts to fail if they contained attachments with shortened or redirected URLs, is indeed a Facebook bug that affects every application that uses this feature.

In response to this issue we just deployed a workaround on our servers that will allow your posts to go through until Facebook fixes the issue. Now RSS Graffiti instead of shortening URLs it actually tries to expand (un-shorten) them. This effectively bypasses the Facebook issue.

At the moment of writing this, Facebook is also rolling-out a fix. We will keep our workaround in place until the fix by Facebook is confirmed.

For details on the bug see Bug 14832 on Facebook’s bug tracker. 

[UPDATE] This is a confirmed Facebook bug. We deployed a new work around. Read details here.

Many posts with attachments have been failing for the past several hours with the message:

Facebook responded with error 100: ‘attachment-href URL is not properly formatted’.

It turns out that Facebook is rejecting URLs shortened with bit.ly. This has happened also in the past, but Facebook had fixed the issue promptly. Our guess is that they will fix it again soon.

Nevertheless, as a temporary workaround, to unblock your posts from going through, we decided to bypass URL shortening with bit.ly.

We will keep monitoring the situation and keep you updated. We will re-enable bit.ly support after Facebook resolves this issue.

Recently some users complained of getting a blank page while trying to access RSS Graffiti. With the help of one of our users we have been finally able to reproduce the problem and track down the cause.

I’ll get more technical about it later. Let me give you the bottom line first:

To solve this we have to disable the listing of your events on the left-hand column of RSS Graffiti.

What does this mean?

This means that you will not be able to see a list of your Facebook Events in the user interface and thus will not be able to click on any of them to add or edit your feeds for them.

Workaround

We will work on a workaround for this tomorrow and push it as soon as we can. In the mean time if you have added feeds on an Event and need to modify them please contact us at support@rssgraffiti.com, or leave a message on our Facebook Wall (http://facebook.com/rss.graffiti), or in our user support community (http://getsatisfaction.com/rssgraffiti) and we will help you make the modifications you need to do.

Is publishing on Event Wall affected?

No, publishing will continue normally for the feeds that you have already setup for your Facebook Events. This issue affects only the user interface.

How long will this go on?

Disabling the listing of Events in the UI is a temporary measure to allow the users that were blocked by this issue to use RSS Graffiti normally. Luckily the number of Event Walls that use RSS Graffiti is relatively small and hopefully those users will not be affected but this measure before we come up with an alternative solution. We hope to be able to find an alternative solution to the problem tomorrow.

So what was the problem?

The problem is that a Facebook FQL query which should list the Events created by a user, suddenly times out for some users. Although our implementation should work normally, there is some unknown problem in Facebook that causes it to time-out so badly that you don’t even see the Facebook logo appearing when this happens. We will file a bug to Facebook for this and look for alternative ways to implement the specific functionality ASAP.

Special thanks to the users that worked with us to track this down. We’ll keep you updated on how we tackle this issue.

After bringing everything back up and looking at our log files to see what happened, we conclude that this embarrassing downtime could have gone by unnoticed had we realized it sooner.

RSS Graffiti runs on multiple servers. The website and the front end of the application run independently from the processing engine. The problem started on one of our back-end servers while we were still up and working, but we failed to get the alert before calling it a day and going to bed. Then gradually everything started to go wrong to the point the front-end web server became unresponsive. Later, the processing queue stopped functioning too and the rest of the servers that were still up couldn’t do anything about it without human intervention.

During the past days we have been phasing out an old domain name we were using when we started developing RSS Graffiti. Changes in the DNS and MX along with an apparent bug at Google Apps GMail , caused a mail actually originating from rssgraffiti.com to appear to have been sent via our old domain name which in turn led us to ignore the warning.

Disasters usually come about by a number of small coincidences and this one was no exception. Although the problem with the mail will most likely not happen again, we definitely need to find a way to wake up when an alert comes in. RSS Graffiti can sustain failures and recover from them without affecting the end user, but obviously this is not true if the problem remains unnoticed and unsolved for many hours.

We would like to ask you to please accept our apologies for this incident and assure you for our determination to prevent similar issues from happening in the future.

As strange as it might seem, some Fan Page administrators have been complaining lately about problems removing RSS Graffiti. It is strange because removing an application is a standard Facebook procedure, it is completely independent of any application and it should be bullet proof and just work.

If you are facing such problem please read on for some insight on what is going on and how you can resolve your issue.

First make sure the application is removed from the Fan Page (not just your Facebook Profile)

Sometimes people are tricked into thinking that removing an application from a Facebook Profile, also automatically removes the application from the Fan Pages the user administers. Of course this is not the case. Profiles are independent of Fan Pages and that is as designed by Facebook. So first of all make sure the application is removed from the Fan Page.

To do that:

• Go to the Fan Page
• Click “Edit Page”
• Find the RSS Graffiti application listed along with the other applications you added on the Fan Page and 
• Click on the “Remove Application” link

If you think that the application has been removed from (or never been added to) the Fan Page but it still posts, please just check once more. Sometimes Fan Pages have more than one administrators. You might have removed the application from the Fan Page but another administrator might have added it there.

If you are certain that the application has been removed from the Fan Page but it still posts then please follow the instructions in “How to disable posting on a Fan Page" to make sure you disable posting. Some insight on how can an application post on Fan Page even if it seems to be removed can also be found in that post.

For the past few hours we have been monitoring our new release and trying to identify and resolve any issues. The processing engine seems to run very smoothly and processes all feeds of all targets in less than a minute as expected.

Nevertheless we identified some issues relating to session keys and publishing on Application Profile walls. These do not affect everyone but there are some cases where they can prevent posts from completing successfully. We are going to be working on ways to overcome these issues in the coming days.

All feedback will be valuable.

If you are eager to read the good news, skip right to the bottom of this post.

Experiencing  an amazing increase in adoption, RSS Graffiti has been seeing its number of users doubling again and again. It’s a little over a month ago that we crossed the 50.000 active user milestone and we are already past 65.000 active users and counting.

Our current server capacity was originally designed to serve roughly 40.000 active users without making compromises on performance. Here are our goals on performance:

• Optimal cycle duration: 5 minutes
• Maximum cycle duration: 10 minutes

"Cycle duration" is the time it takes RSS Graffiti’s processing engine to go through all feeds of all users once and do its task (fetch and publish all new entries).

So our current infrastructure was expected to be able to maintain optimal cycle duration if serving up to roughly 40.000 active users. Which was true.

Our current infrastructure was also able to maintain our maximum cycle duration of 10 minutes up to roughly 55.000 users.

But for the past week or two, the bottleneck is getting more and more noticeable and processing cycles take more than 20 minutes at best and often more than 30 minutes.

So it’s time to upgrade our server infrastructure!

Here is the good news:

In a few hours we will be releasing our new RSS Graffiti version 1.9.0 Beta and while doing that, we are going to increase our server capacity too. Our latest tests show that the new version of RSS Graffiti using the new servers is able to process all our current users and feeds in less than a minute. So our optimal cycle duration of 5 minutes is going to be well maintained for quite some time.

So till soon then! Delays are about to become a thing of the past again.

UPDATE 2010-07-20: Performance issues in version 1.9.0 Beta have been resolved. Release panned for tomorrow.

UPDATE 2010-07-19: After encountering performance problems on the production server we had to withdraw version 1.9.0 Beta for further testing and revert back to version 1.8.7 Beta.

We are preparing to release RSS Graffiti version 1.9.0 Beta later today. One of the important updates in the new version is a change on our integration with Bit.ly. To allow for this and other updates, we had to make some design changes in our database. 

So, preparing for tonight’s release we are now taking the application offline for a while to make the necessary updates to the live database before deploying the new version. The disruption in the service is expected to last roughly for half an hour. Nevertheless, we know that we will have to take the application offline at least twice today to complete the deployment process. 

During the down-time your feeds will also pause processing. Updates in your feeds will resume automatically as soon as the application is back online.

Thanks for your patience and your support.

As RSS Graffiti user base grows, we recently started to run into quota problems with Twitter again. This means that some of you already see sporadic failures in publishing your Tweets to Facebook followed by a message from RSS Graffiti that says that a valid feed could not be found in your Twitter feed URL.

This is caused by the fact that RSS Graffiti (although white-listed by Twitter) has a limit of 20.000 requests per hour. Sometimes this limit is exceeded and the problem mentioned above occurres.

There is no need to worry too much about this issue though, as we have already implemented and will release in the coming days a new feature in RSS Graffiti that will eliminate this issue. More specifically RSS Graffiti, starting from its next version, will allow you to connect your own Twitter account and it will then be able to use it to connect with Twitter for you.

This means that instead of using RSS Graffiti’s own Twitter account for getting everyone’s tweets from Twitter, we will be able to use the account of each user for retrieving their own tweets. Although each user has a much lower Twitter quota than RSS Graffiti, their own quota should be enough for the needs of each user. On top of that, we can always automatically fall-back to our own default account in case someone’s quota is temporarily exceeded.

You will also be able to specify multiple twitter accounts and use different accounts for different feeds, or even specify default accounts for use in different pages. These are going to be quite useful for users that manage a lot of Fan Pages and Groups.

So there you have it! Hang on for a few more days! Do also stay tuned with us, as we have lots of more interesting features build specifically for Twitter coming in our next release(s).

UPDATE | Feb 9, 2010:

This issue has been resolved in RSS Graffiti version 1.8.6 Beta.

We just noticed that an old bug from Facebook, causing problems with application CSS loading, is still alive, especially the last few days with the intermittent performance issues of the facebook API platform.

You might experience a broken layout, in the Feed Preview mode in particular - if you are using IE as your browser.

More on the Platform perfromance issues you can find here…

More on the specific bug you can find here…

We hope this issue will get fixed soon, and ask for your patience in the meanwhile.