Thanks to the fact that you people keep using Feed My Inbox like crazy, we have to schedule some additional server maintenance this weekend to keep everything moving very fast and reliably. 

This Saturday, May 2, from 1 - 3pm Central Standard Time, the service will be unavailable while we add a new database server to the mix. No customer data will be at risk as a result of this maintenance, as we are simply moving the database and turning everything back on. If anything does not go according to plan, we'll be sure to let you know with another post to this blog. Thanks!

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A few weeks back we secretly launched a new bookmarklet for Feed My Inbox. Don't know what a bookmarklet is? Have no fear! We've embedded a simple 2-minute video demonstration for you below on how it works.

If you have an account, make sure to login, click "Tools", and drag the bookmarklet to your toolbar from there so your email address is pre-filled. We hope you enjoy the new feature, be sure to let us know what you think!

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Thanks to the 8,000+ customers and nearly 30,000 feeds we are now tracking, Feed My Inbox will be getting new digs this weekend! We are going to move the site to newer, faster hardware so that we can continue awesome growth of the service moving forward.

How it effects you

Feed My Inbox will go offline on Sunday around 1pm central standard time. There will be a message on the site informing everyone about the scheduled maintenance. We expect the downtime to last between 2-5 hours, however this will have absolutely no effect on your account or any emails scheduled to go out. During this time, you will be unable to access your account, subscribe to new feeds, confirm/unsubscribe from feeds and so forth.

Once we finish the move, the service will be back running like normal. We are taking all of the appropriate measures to ensure this process goes very smoothly. Thanks very much, feel free to drop us a line if you have any specific questions.

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As with any web application, there is a small percentage of users that abuse our service for personal gain. Today's post is about those people, and what we plan to do about it.

We have noticed that some of our customers found a way to re-post the text of an email from Feed My Inbox to a blog or website that is ad-supported, thus generating income from content that is not theirs. There are 3 problems with this practice:

1. The content is not yours, nor did you create it. Chances are you do not have authorization to re-post it on a blog or website. That's just mean.

2. Search engine guys call this "duplicate content". If your site has the same content as someone else that originally posted that content, both sites are penalized by search engines like Google. So that sucks for the content creator.

3. These blog posts include the Feed My Inbox branding, and we don't endorse it. We are watching, and will cancel your account since it is against our terms of service.

As content creators ourselves, we don't want to encourage anyone that takes part in this practice. Please don't do it, or you will have to find a new RSS to email provider.

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First things first, we made a mistake last week with regards to Feed My Inbox. Here is how it effects our customers:

1. Early Friday morning, the server had a hardware failure, and the email queue started crawling. Emails were piling up faster than the server could send them for 2 days. Early yesterday morning, we resumed normal operation and the email system is now completely up-to-date.

As a result of this issue, you may have seen emails stream in up to 2 days late yesterday or today, but nothing was lost.

2. In trying to improve the situation on Saturday, we made it a little worse and lost some data. Here are the customers that are effected:

• If you unsubscribed from a feed/email between Feb. 1 and Feb. 22, your unsubscription may have been lost. If you receive an email from a feed that you already unsubscribed from, simply unsubscribe again and we will NOT lose it this time.
• Between Feb. 1-22, if you subscribed to a new feed, confirmed your subscription, but never received any emails from that feed during Feb. 1-22, your subscription has been lost. If you received at least one email update from that feed, no account information has been lost.

This is the first real issue we have had with Feed My Inbox, and hopefully the last. We are very sorry for ANY inconvenience this has caused, and take full responsibility for the mistake.

The great thing about mistakes is that is forces you to take action to prevent them from happening again. In the very near future, Feed My Inbox will be moved to new hardware that is more capable of handling any problems, and full backups will take place more often. In addition, this was the kick in the butt we needed to finish out a long requested feature!

Announcing Customer Accounts!

It is most important to us that Feed My Inbox remains just as simple and easy to use as it has always been. So having an account is and always will be optional. Nothing is changing about the process of subscribing to feeds and receiving them via email.

From now on, the bottom of all confirmation and feed emails will have a link at the bottom where you can create an account. If you click the link to create your account, all you have to do is fill in a password and you are finished.

Once logged into your account, there is a simple dashboard where you can see all of your feeds, confirm new subscriptions and unsubscribe from them. We also have tabs where you can export an OPML of your feeds, update your account profile and even cancel your account.

In light of the recent issues from last week, the customer account area will hopefully assist you in keeping track of feeds and fixing anything that may have happened as a result of our mistake.

Next Steps

We have lots of great features planned for the account area in the near future. This is simply "phase 1", and we hope that it makes life a little easier.

One of the features we are currently testing is real-time email updates, instead of one daily digest of posts. If you are interested in getting all of your feed emails in real-time as opposed to one daily email with all posts, contact us and we will turn it on for you. Once we feel good about the feature, we will add frequency options to all accounts.

We appreciate you being a customer, and REALLY appreciate your understanding while we try to make up for the recent mistake. As always, your feedback, questions and comments about the new account area is welcome.

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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:

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 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 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.

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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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.

Step 2

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

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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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!

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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.

Thanks to Corey for the suggestion last week.

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