Why doesn’t newsblur get my feed updates instantaneously? Sometimes my feeds are only checked three times a day and there doesn’t seem to be a way of me setting my preferences here.
Are there any other RSS readers that are more ‘instantaneous’?
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No newsreader pulls feeds continuously; they poll your feeds periodically. That costs time, money, and bandwidth. In order to distribute the load, NewsBlur pulls more popular feeds more often, and pulls less popular feeds that belong to paid members first. The more people who subscribe to a feed, the more often it is polled. For less popular feeds, if you pay for a NewsBlur subscription, your feeds will be moved up the ranks.
Any news reader which lives in your computer as a free-standing application - NewsGator, for instance - can be set to pull as often as you want it to, but you won’t be able to access it from the web.
Newsblur staff have stated that feeds are pulled every two hours. That’s not how it actually works, but that is what they have stated.
Where have they stated that feeds are checked every two hours? Each feed has its own schedule, as Randy stated above.
Using the web client, you can see the frequency by right-clicking on the feed in your list and selecting “Statistics”. This will show you approximately how often that feed is polled.
If you want to fetch the most recent entries for a feed, you can right-click on the feed and select “Insta-Fetch”.
I find that NewsBlur actually updates my feeds faster than Google Reader did. I believe that Google Reader took into account how often a particular feed was updated, so some feeds that were updated infrequently were not polled very often. Or at least that’s how it seemed to me.
In a previous thread at http://goo.gl/CJQKc1, Samuel Clay stated that “every feed held by a premium user is updated at the minimum of once an hour. Popular feeds more often, and if the feed has published less than an average of 1 story over the past month, then it gets updated just a few times a day”.
So my prior post should have said that feeds are updated every hour, not every two hours.
All of this is moot anyway, as some feeds go for several days without retrieval.
I’ve asked newsblur for a clarification on the frequency that posts are retrieved, but the have avoided a firm response.
Any feed that is updating regularly should be fetched regularly. Statistics will tell you that. Can you share the newsblur.com site url of a feed that isn’t doing what you expect?
So you are saying, contrary to the post from you that I have been quoting, that post do not update hourly.
In fact, if I understand correctly now, you are saying that posts have no set standard for retrieval, but it is instead based on some confidential algorithm that you don’t care to share.
I keep asking the question: How often do feeds get pulled?
Can you define “Regularly”? Every hour? Every day? Every three days?
Every three days is not regularly, it is sporadically.