November 26, 2008

Useful Tools to Make the Most of Your Feeds

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If you are tracking any feeds through a feed reader or through our Feed My Inbox service, congrats on being hip to this great technology. Ready to take it to the next level?

There is a host of really fantastic tools out there that can help you manipulate, combine and filter any feed to your liking. Here are a few of our favorites:

ChimpFeedr

The concept behind ChimpFeedr is very simple. It allows you to take any number of feeds and combine them into one simple feed. Easy as pie, so you could technically subscribe to ALL of your feeds and get one daily email from Feed My Inbox if you so choose.

Feed Rinse

Feed Rinse is a tool that lets you filter your feeds by keyword, author, tag, and MORE, so that you only get the results you are interested in. You can even upload an OPML file of all your feeds and start filtering away. It is very efficient and easy to use!

Yahoo! Pipes

Yahoo! Pipes gets more advanced with their feature set and capabilities. Their service will let you combine, sort, filter and even translate feeds. For instance, you can take an eBay feed and filter it by price and other criteria using pipes so that you only get results that fit your specifications. They make lots of their pipes public so you can browse for ideas.

Dapper

With Dapper, feeds are only the beginning, and they get into some pretty amazing ways of tracking content on a web page. Their pitch is that you can create a feed from any website. However, this is the most complicated service, so it will take longer to learn how to use it. Instead of trying to explain the wide variety of feeds you can create using dapper, I would encourage you to watch the video demo.

We hope these services are very helpful to you in making the most of your feeds!

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November 7, 2008

NEW Feature- Create Your Own Signup Form

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We are really excited to launch the most requested Feed My Inbox feature today, which is the ability to create your own email signup form for your site or blog. Here's how it works:






Step 1

Visit http://www.feedmyinbox.com/feeds/formCode/ and enter your FEED URL. Unlike the application, you can't just enter in a website URL, it has to be the feed location.

Form One

Step 2

We'll generate the code for you, so just copy/paste and style to your liking on your own site.

Form Two

Are you expecting more steps? Then you don't know us very well, because that's it!

We've added a form to this site on the sidebar, so feel free to try it out!

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October 29, 2008

Feed My Inbox on your iPhone

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Today we put the finishing touches on an iPhone version of the Feed My Inbox site. Simply visit http://www.feedmyinbox.com like normal in your Safari browser on the phone, and you will see a site crafted just for all the iPhoners out there.

We also added a little icon for those of you that want to access the site straight from your home screen. Click the "+" sign on the website, then "Add to Home Screen". Be sure to let us know if you have any comments about the new site!

iPhone Screenshots

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October 13, 2008

How to Auto-Populate the URL in Feed My Inbox

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Last week we added a feature to Feed My Inbox that should be useful for website owners and administrators. You can now create a link on your website that will auto-populate the URL in Feed My Inbox when clicked on.

For example, if you would like to create a link that will automatically fill in your feed URL or website address, it should look like this: http://www.feedmyinbox.com/?feed=your_feed_url_here .

Subscribing to our blog would look like this: http://www.feedmyinbox.com/?feed=http://www.brightwurks.com ;

OR like this: http://www.feedmyinbox.com/?feed=http://feeds.feedburner.com/brightwurks .

The first link uses our website address, and the second link uses our feed URL. Feed My Inbox knows how to parse both properly, so you can do it either way. Once clicked, the page will look like the screenshot below. All the user has to do is enter their email address.

Feed My Inbox Window

Thanks to Corey for the suggestion last week.

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October 6, 2008

Building a Web App in 24 Hours: Feed My Inbox

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It started over brunch with my parents, as they were visiting us in New York over the summer. The subject of Twitter came up, and my Mom wanted a way to see what I was up to. I knew the only way she would be able to do that was if she got email updates from the RSS feed. A lightbulb went off, and before brunch was over I purchased 3 domains from my blackberry.

Over the next 24 hours, I tried to find any services delivering feed updates through email, and was eventually convinced the market is up for grabs. I threw together a pitch to Jared and Denny (my partners in crime at Brightwurks), and by Monday our project was a go.

Being a new and bootstrapped (no funding) software company, making time to build Feed My Inbox was the first challenge. We had ideas on how to monetize the app, but knew it would take time. It became clear very early that we could build the most basic, first version of this product fast if we gave it a full day and developed only the "must have" features. So that is just what we did.

The goal was to build Feed My Inbox in 24 hours.

We each took a day off from client work to focus completely on building the app. By end of day we had a logo, finished the designs and front-end code, and were 75% done with the back-end portion that pulls it all together. Getting that far was a huge victory in itself. Had we not originally placed these time constraints on the project, we would not have gotten half of that done.

Just so that Feed My Inbox was not an utter failure or full of bugs, we decided not to launch until giving the equivalent of one more day to put on the finishing touches.

It is tough to put into words the great feeling of launching a web application merely a few weeks after having the idea. Today, a little more than a month after launch, we have over 2,000 accounts and are tracking nearly 6,000 feeds across the web. TONS of back-end improvements have been made along the way to make Feed My Inbox a smooth experience for all users.

Are we anxious to build more features for Feed My Inbox? Absolutely. Is it important to monetize the application eventually? Absolutely. Should either of these things have kept us from launching the application after only 2 days of development? Absolutely not!

5 Reasons to Build Web Apps FAST and with Minimal Features

  1. It forces you to be decisive.
  2. It is cheaper. Bootstrapping your application helps minimize time and cost until it is profitable.
  3. Launching is a huge WIN, and confidence boost for everyone involved with the project.
  4. A minimal feature set gives your customers the opportunity to tell you what features are important, which may shift your internal priorities.
  5. After launch if you realize that you need to adjust your original plan or even do a 180, you are not in a hole so deep that you cannot dig out.

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