I’ve been steadily adding new features to KickRSS over the last 8 hours or so. Most of them are behind the scenes, making things a bit easier for me, but there’s some which are worth mentioning here. From the biggest news to the smallest:

• Added smooth degredation of dead RSS feeds - feeds which fail to work are now checked hourly for 12 hours (along with the rest of the feeds), then drop down to daily for 16 days, then stop being checked. At each of the last two steps, users (i.e., you) can prompt the site to re-check the feed to see if it’s become active again. If you’re viewing your KickRSS feed through the website interface, you’ll see a notice about the latter two steps at the top of the page. I’m not too sure how to get this message across to those of you who use the RSS interface.
• Upgraded the Search facilities - instead of using JavaScript to search only the feeds displaying on the page normally, the site now goes back to the database to look for your search term, and displays up to 50 of the most recent articles with your search term in it.
• Added a Remote Search facility - those of you with websites can now put a small bit of code (located in the Manage Feed section) on your site which allows your visitors to enter a search term, press enter, and immediately end up at the KickRSS page showing the results for their query.
• Added a new “What is KickRSS” page
• Added a log out option in the Manage Feeds section; somehow, this escaped when I did the original session stuff for that area.

There will hopefully be more coming fairly soon, depending on my Real Life schedule. A few hints at what I have planned: more output options (think ATOM, JavaScript, etc.); more customisability with the website output page; more of the RSS data inputted and outputted; … But it all depends on how much time I have, so no promises.