- Who made SigFeeder?
- Is SigFeeder really free?
- What personal information does SigFeeder gather/keep?
- Will SigFeeder sell or trade my personal information to spammers or other third parties?
- Will SigFeeder work with my blog?
- Will SigFeeder work with sites that aren't blogs?
- Will SigFeeder work with Atom feeds?
- What do SigFeeds look like?
- Will SigFeeder work with blogs with titles written in non-Roman characters?
- When/how often does my SigFeed update?
- What third-party code and resources does SigFeeder use?
- I have a problem, or I think I found a bug. Help!
- I have a question that's not answered here…
SigFeeder's creator would be me, Garrett Albright. I'm a twentysomething bum living in the true northern California, among the redwood forests. I'm a self-taught web designer and programmer hobbyist. I'm currently "between careers;" when the idea for SigFeeder popped into my head, I decided to develop it and see if it could supplement my dwindling finances. That didn't happen, but I think SigFeeder is a really cool tool, so I'm keeping it online anyway.
Why not check out my tech-related blog, Ray Gun Robot? I bet you'll find it interesting. Or, if you have a position open at your business, hire me and put me to work for you!
Back to MenuYes! At one time I charged a small fee for a Premium Account which offered more features over standard accounts, but nobody wanted to buy these. So I relented and gave all accounts the benefits of the Premium Accounts for free.
A lot less that many other web sites! For all the details, see the Fine Print page.
Absolutely not. SigFeeder respects your privacy; all information you provide to SigFeeder which is not for display in your SigFeed, such as your email address, will be kept private by SigFeeder.
Probably. SigFeeder relies on technologies called "RSS" and "Atom" which allows a blog to share information about its contents through special files called "feeds." (See How SigFeeder Works for more information.) Almost all blogging software (such as Movable Type, Serendipity and WordPress) and blog hosting sites (such as LiveJournal, Blogger and Xanga) provide RSS and/or Atom feeds. If you're not sure if your blog does, enter your blog's web address into the text box below and click "Find Feed." SigFeeder will attempt to automatically find a feed for your blog and report the results back to you. (Notably, Myspace blogs are incompatible with SigFeeder as they do not provide any feeds.
Technically, SigFeeder should work with any site that provides a working RSS feed. This can include many sites that wouldn't traditionally be called a "blog," such as news sites and message boards. If you have a Flickr account, try giving SigFeeder the address of your Flickr album; it'll create a SigFeed of your most recently added images!
Yes. In fact, anywhere on this site I mention "RSS feed," it's safe to assume I mean "RSS and Atom feeds." However, for the sake of simplicity and familiarity, I will stick with the phrase "RSS feed."
If your blog is hosted by Blogger/BlogSpot, it's recommended that you use their Atom feed with SigFeeder instead of their RSS feed, as the RSS feed seems to provide incorrect date information most of the time, which will cause your SigFeed not to update when it should. If you have SigFeeder auto-detect your feed, it will automatically detect the Atom feed first on Blogger/BlogSpot sites.
Whatever you want it to look like! See this page for some sample SigFeeds.
SigFeeder should fully support any Unicode-compatible language. However, please note that the font you select for your SigFeed to use (if you have a Premium account) may not support the language you wish to use — see the font chart for a list of the fonts you can select from and how well they support various languages.
At present, SigFeeder has not been well tested with right-to-left languages like Arabic or Hebrew, so SigFeeder may behave unexpectedly when using such languages. If you have set up a SigFeed using a right-to-left language and would like to help me improve SigFeeder's support for such languages, please contact me.
If you use Scheduled Updates, it will update every six hours. If you use Ping Updates, it will update immediately after you post a new entry to your blog.
The following technologies and creations of other people made the creation of SigFeeder much easier. Their contributions are appreciated.
- SigFeeder is written in the PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor scripting language.
- Data is stored in an SQLite database.
- SigFeeder is hosted by Dreamhost.
- The Smarty Template Engine makes maintaining site-wide visual consistency even with dynamic data output a breeze.
- SigFeeder was mostly written using the Smultron text editor on a PowerBook laptop computer made by Apple Computer.
SigFeeder makes use of the following fonts:
- DejaVu
- Free UCS Outline Fonts
- Junicode
- Silkscreen
- Un Fonts
- FireflySung
- CJKUnifonts (ukai & uming)
Having a problem? Please save both your time and mine by looking for your answer on this FAQ or on the Help Index first. But if you still can't find the info you're looking for, feel free to get in touch with me!
Check out the Help Index. The answers you seek may be there.