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Hi I have been creating RSS feeds in Yahoo! pipes to use in an iPhone application that I am building. I have the pipe working fine and containing the right information, I only have one problem. Every time that Yahoo pipes needs to refresh it's data because my iPhone app is accessing the feed URL, it takes about 30 seconds for it to update the feed and that is a very long waiting time in an iPhone app for an update.

I have been searching for a way to basically have a middle man between my iPhone app and yahoo pipes. So that it can query yahoo pipes once every few minutes. This way any slow loading by yahoo pipes won't matter because the middle man will always have at least the latest cache from yahoo pipes stored for the iPhone app to quickly download. Then the 30 second wait time will only affect the middle man and make any updates to that slower but it won't slow down the iPhone app.

I tried feed burner but that didn't quite work how I wanted and I would also ideally like the JSON for the RSS feed to be stored. I was wondering if anyone knows of any simple solutions that I haven't thought of. I have been trying for days to search for a way but I can't quite come up with the right search terms for what I want to do. Any help or points in the right direction would be much appreciated, or at least some guidance on things to search for would be great. Thanks!

RGullotti
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  • What did you not like about feedburner? – pguardiario Jan 09 '12 at 22:29
  • feed burner would often time out while waiting for the yahoo pipe to load and then it wouldn't update, it also only allows for me to read the rss data from the yahoo pipe. Ideally I would like to have something store the JSON data from the yahoo pipe because that allows me to keep view my custom tags and makes parsing easier. – RGullotti Jan 10 '12 at 00:45

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It sounds like you're looking for a feed caching service. You can try these guys.

If that doesn't work out you can always write a quick web app that downloads your feed every hour or so and then serves the cached version. I believe amazon is still giving out free micro ec2 instances to new users if you need a host.

pguardiario
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  • thanks for the link, rsscache.com has some of the same issues as feed burner and also only shows about 18 items of the 43 available items so It might not be the best. It looks like I might have to go the way of the web app to download my feed, it sounds like that would be the best for me. Is there any link you can share to help me get started on creating a simple web app like that? I haven't dealt with web applications before so I'm a little confused on how to start. – RGullotti Jan 10 '12 at 03:42
  • One simple way would be to have apache serve a cached version of your pipe and use curl to download it on a schedule – pguardiario Jan 10 '12 at 03:50
  • Thanks for the suggestion! I've been looking around and researching today and I can't find a tutorial or explanation on how to achieve this. I'd appreciate it if you knew a link or something to help get me jump started. I'm going to keep looking and trying to learn how to do this so thanks for the idea! – RGullotti Jan 11 '12 at 02:41
  • thanks for the idea! i've successfully wrote a php curl script that gets my json data and saves it to a file on server. Now I just need to figure out how to run my script every minute or so and I'll be good. Thanks! – RGullotti Jan 14 '12 at 03:06