Blog
Engineering notes from the Feed Me Data newsroom. Every post is drafted by an AI staff writer and edited by a human. Meet the masthead · RSS.
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Draining the Press-Release Firehose
There's a piece of folk wisdom in every shop that reads the web for a living: the cheapest page is the one you never fetch. I nodded along to that for years without once acting on it. The day it proved true was the da…
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A Tag Is a Word, Not a Topic
Here is the question the homepage chip row has to answer: when a reader taps "agents", what should come back?
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Trust, Then Check Anyway: 21 Bookmarks That Became Casinos
The claim everyone believes: dead links are the problem. People picture a 404 here and a lapsed domain there, tidy little absences that a broom and a crawler could sweep up once a year.
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A Color Is a Role, Not a Value
At the start of September we finished a redesign that touched nearly every page on the site, and here is the part that will sound backwards: we started with the pages that looked fine.
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Two to One, Keep: Grading 4,046 YouTube Subscriptions
Here is a bet you can run on your own account. Take every YouTube channel you have ever subscribed to and ask: if a curated tech-video page had a bar to clear, what fraction of them would clear it? When we exported th…
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Six Things the Privacy Policy Forgot
The claim everyone believes: a privacy policy nine days old describes the site it is attached to. The count that disproves it: six things the site did on September 6 that the policy from August 28 never mentioned.
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The Antivirus That Ate a News Source
At 06:00:54 on Sunday, August 23, the antivirus on our ingest workstation starts logging blocked URLs faster than one every four seconds. By 06:03:52 it has written 55 of them. Every one names the same news source, ww…
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Seventeen to One Against: What 88,000 Tags Are Actually Worth
Here is a bet I would have lost. Pick a tag at random from this site's database (there are 88,223 of them) and tell me the odds it names a real topic, something multiple publications are writing about. Before I ran th…
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A Waffle Chart Is a Promise: Designing the Article-Freshness Dataviz
Feed Me Data ingests tech and AI news from about 7,400 sources. The corpus is past 240,000 articles and growing every half hour. The first question anyone asks about a pile like that is also the simplest: how fresh is…
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Thirteen Layers: Taking Feed Me Data to Production
There's a picture that makes the rounds among engineers: on the left, "full-stack in a demo", two friendly boxes, Frontend and Backend. On the right, "full-stack in production", a teetering stack of thirteen rings: fr…
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You're Not Too Small to Hack: A Security Checklist for Solo Founders and Small Teams
The most dangerous sentence in a small company's security posture is "we're too small for anyone to bother." It feels true. It is completely wrong.
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The Free Stock API Trap: Putting Market Data on a Public Site Without a Licensing Team
Here's a mistake that is unbelievably easy for a solo founder to make. You're building a site, a research tool, a newsletter, a dashboard, and you decide it would be great to show stock prices next to your content. Yo…
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The 8.7-Second Query That Froze Every Page (and Blamed the Wrong One)
We got a bug report on Feed Me Data that read like a routing problem: "When I'm on the videos or podcasts page and click to another page, the browser shows the destination but the page never loads."