Chordata, my directory of RSS and Atom feeds has been growing quickly, and is soon to see some changes that should make it grow a lot faster. In preparation for that growth, I decided yesterday that it's about time to give it a URL that's more memorable and independent than "chordata.geckotribe.com". Unfortunately, "chordata.com" was already taken, so I opted for chordata.info.

What are the changes I mentioned above, you ask? I'll tell you...some of them.

The main change is that soon the contents of feeds will be searchable. Right now, only the feed categories, feed titles and feed descriptions are. This will require some big additions to the back-end infrastructure of the site. Keeping on top of changes to thousands of feeds will burn a lot of bandwidth, so I'm working on a few techniques for managing that. One of those is something I'm calling RefreshRank, which is a formula for determining how often each feed is checked for updates. I doubt that I'll be releasing the details of the formula--let's just say that it's geared toward the twin goals of providing the best possible search results and minimizing bandwidth waste.

A related feature addition will be making it possible to subscribe to search results as an RSS or Atom feed. I'll need to work out some details regarding whether to include all source feeds or to limit it to highly rated feeds (or to offer both options); whether to make the subscription service free, fee-based, or a combination of the two (with free feeds containing advertising, for example); ensuring that I'm not reselling content without the copyright owner's permission; etc.

One more change I'll mention vaguely is that I'll be making some improvements to the feed submission and approval system to reduce the size of the unapproved feed queue.

So many exciting ideas, so few available hours in the day! But I suppose if we were able to do all the things we want to do too quickly, we'd lose the joy of anticipation and the satisfaction of having completed a major task, and would run out of fun pretty soon!