Last February I covered a service called Feed43, which allows you to create regular expression scrapes of a given Web page and save the output to an RSS feed. The URL of the site is http://feed43.com/, but the site calls itself Feed for Free. Unfortunately it isn’t.

I had noticed for several days the little example feed I had made (counting the number of subscribers my feed had in Bloglines) wasn’t functioning. I figured it was my browser, or the regular expression I used to scrape the number didn’t work anymore. When I got around to visiting Feed for Free, though, I saw this:

“Due to high load, service is currently limited to serve only paid users. We are working hard to overcome this.”

So right now the service is Feed for Paid. Which is fine, only I wish I’d seen an e-mail alerting me to that fact. Feed 43’s blog has an explanation for the outage and additional information. The free services are not expected to be back for 3-4 weeks.

It’s still a great idea; I found it surprising how easy it was to use. Check out the upgrade pricing — the lowest paid-level account, which offers 20 paid feeds, is $29 a year.