title: Rails Tableless Model
body: <p>I'm creating a tableless Rails model, and am a bit stuck on how I should use it.</p>
  
  <p>Basically I'm trying to create a little application using <a href="http://github.com/pauldix/feedzirra" rel="nofollow noreferrer">Feedzirra</a> that scans a RSS feed every X seconds, and then sends me an email with only the updates.</p>
  
  <p>I'm actually trying to use it as an activerecord model, and although I can get it to work, it doesn't seem to "hold" data as expected.</p>
  
  <p>As an example, I have an initializer method that parses the feed for the first time. On the next requests, I would like to simply call the get_updates method, which according to feedzirra, is the existing object (created during the initialize) that gets updated with only the differences.</p>
  
  <p>I'm finding it really hard to understand how this all works, as the object created on the initialize method doesn't seem to persist across all the methods on the model.</p>
  
  <p>My code looks something like:</p>
  
  <pre><code>def initialize
       feed parse here
  end
  
  def get_updates
       feedzirra update passing the feed object here
  end
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>Not sure if this is the right way of doing it, but it all seems a bit confusing and not very clear. I could be over or under-doing here, but I'd like your opinion about this approach.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance</p>