Curated Feeds in Feed Control

In Feed Control you can now enable curation mode on your feeds. This is a new feature for Plus and Business plans.

Curation mode is intended for users who have set up feed generation in Feed Control. When enabled, Feed Control will monitor the source feed as before, but you will now have to pick the items that should be included in the feed output.

In this mode, items that Feed Control processes will be marked as candidates and not automatically included in the generated feed.

This is useful if you want to be very selective about the feed items that should be processed by any system consuming your feed. If filtering rules have been set up, items that fail to pass the filters will be marked as ‘filtered’, making it easier for you to decide which items to consider for inclusion.

You can enable curation mode by editing a feed and going into the filters tab:

Item visibility

Whether you enable curation mode or not, you can now also change the visibility of feed items to hide specific items from the generated feed.

When you change item visibility you have the following options:

• Visible – this is the default visibility mode and means that items will be included in the generated feed.
• Keep visible – ignore feed filters – this is like above, but protects the item from having its visibility changed if you update and re-apply your filters.
• Hidden – ignore feed filters – this excludes the item from feed output. It’s similar to the ‘filtered’ state, except that it’s applied manually and also ensures the item cannot be made visible again if you update and re-apply your filters.

As part of this update, we now show you filtered items in the item list. Using the new funnel button you can change the view to show only items which are visible, filtered, or manually hidden.

New action: Re-filter feed items

When you change the filtering rules for a feed, the updated filters only affect new feed items that Feed Control processes. To apply the new filtering rules to existing items, we’ve added a new feed action: Re-filter feed items.

New action: Delete feed item

Previously you were able to delete all web hosting feed items belonging to a feed, but not individual feed items. We now let you selectively delete feed items.

Note: Deleting feed items removes them from the Feed Control database, but if they’re still in the source feed, they will be added again when the feed is refreshed. This is useful if you want Feed Control to re-process the feed item, e.g. if you’ve enabled full-text fetching for the feed. To exclude the item from appearing in the feed output, you should change the item’s visibility to hidden instead (see item visibility section above).

Fixes

Finally, some of you wrote in to tell us that you’d experienced issues after we rolled out the previous update. This incuded some items being marked as ‘failed’ as well as filtering issues. We apologise if your feeds were affected, and have now now fixed the issues that were reported to us. If you still encounter any trouble, please do let us know.