Flood Control and Rate Limiting

It is rarely a good idea to post a large volume of messages to a microblog in one go. Feed2omb has several features to manage this problem.

Rate limiting

Either via the command-line or in the config file for a particular feed, you can specify a maximum number of new feed entries to process in each run. By default, this is set to 2.

Therefore, if you schedule updates every half hour, and have this set to 2, you will post a maximum of 4 items per hours, in batches of two. By adjusting the frequency of updates and the maximum items processed, you can achieve a sensible output based on the content of the feed.

See ConfigFiles and Command-Line for more details.

Eating

When setting up a new feed, you may not want to publish all the old entries to the microblog. By running feed2omb one or more times with the --eat command-line option, you can make it 'eat' old entries - in other words, marking them as processed, but not actually posting them.

Once you've reached the point you want to start from, you can continue as normal without the --eat option.

See Command-Line for more details.

Repeats

Some feeds have an annoying habit of having entries reappear at the top of the feed, e.g. when a blog author makes a minor spelling correction to the post. This can easily be solved at the author's end - for example, using the [http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-minor-edit/](WP Minor Edit) plugin for Wordpress, or with the same feature that is built in to Habari.

However, sometimes the author doesn't care. In this case, using the

sentmode = sentlinks

configuration directive for a feed can be useful. In this mode, feed2omb will keep track of all the item links that have been sent, and will never send the same one twice.

See ConfigFiles for more details.