As some of you undoubtedly noticed, we haven’t been processing stories correctly for a while. There was some bad mojo happening in our backend that wasn’t pulling down feeds properly. And without feeds, there weren’t any new stories showing up. The good news is that this should be fixed now and the server is currently playing catchup. The better news is that we’re putting in some protections for this and better notifications to us when things go wrong. The great news is that we’re also putting in place some optimizations to help speed things up in the process. So, despite the recent badness, there’s plenty of awesomeness coming up.

We’re also in the process of doing a rewrite of our core code. We’re slimming things down and taking what we’ve learned so far to build a better mousetrap, so to speak. The end result will be a better platform for us to add new features and run a stable service. So, stay tuned!

Update

Our optimizations appear to be doing the trick and your feeds should be populating once again. We tweaked the algorithm used in our job queue to pick which jobs to run, so there is a much more even distribution. The prior algorithm would bunch up the reading of all RSS feeds before it got to distributing and filtering them into your account. Now it will work on distributing each feed shortly after downloading it, rather than after all the other feeds have been downloaded. So, you should see faster turnaround times on your scrubbed feeds as a result.

Need help getting set up with Feedscrub?  This video will walk you through the process in under 2 minutes.

This video specifically demonstrates how to use Feedscrub with Google Reader; we’re working on screencasts for NetNewsWire and NewsGator.  Use another reader?  Let us know in the comments.