Feb 13, 2010 Feed My Inbox

3 Comments

New Feature: Confirm sites via meta tag

Last night we added a new feature especially for webmasters, or anyone that has a Feed My Inbox email signup form on their website.

If you want to see your subscriber count and access who is subscribed to your feed, we have a process of confirming ownership of the feed. Up until last night the only way to confirm a site was by uploading an HTML file to your website. Since many folks are on hosted platforms like Blogger, Wordpress, etc. it's not possible to confirm ownership that way.

Now webmasters have the option of uploading the HTML file OR adding a meta tag to the <head> of their website. On most hosted platforms you have access to the head or header template of your site where the custom meta tag can be added.

Here are brief (untested, mind you) instructions for a few of the most popular hosted blogging platforms:

Wordpress.com:

Select "Meta Tag" as your verification and start at your blog dashboard. Go to Appearance > Editor > Header. The meta tag should be added in the header.php template file in between the <head></head> tags.

Blogger / Blogspot:

From your Blogger dashboard, click on "Layout" for the Blogspot you are verifying, then "Edit HTML". In the Edit Template screen, you will see the HTML for your blog template. The meta tag should be added near the top between the <head></head> tags.

Typepad:

The file upload method actually works best on Typepad. When logged in, click on the Library link at the top of your dashboard, then use the File Manager to upload the required html file.

Squarespace:

Select "Meta Tag" as your verification method, and insert the code within [Structure > Website Settings > Code Injection > Extra Header Code] in your site manager.

For more instruction on the process of adding a site in Feed My Inbox, refer to the webmasters page.

Feb 8, 2010 Feed My Inbox

Make a Comment

New Feature: Annual Payment Plans

Today we released Feed My Inbox support for annual payment plans! This has been the most requested feature in the last month and we're happy to add it before most of the free trials expire.

By enrolling in an annual payment plan, you get the equivalent of two free months of service (save up to $32/year). For those that have been less than thrilled about our pricing plans, we hope this is just the push you needed to get on board!

The one thing we haven't released yet is the ability to switch from monthly billing to yearly billing (or vice versa) in the account area. If you already have a monthly plan and prefer to be billed yearly, please touch base with us and we can change it for you.

One last thing we added with regards to payments is pro-rated upgrades. If you upgrade to a bigger monthly/yearly plan at any time, the cost is pro-rated instead of charging you the full amount.

New Subject Line Option

Another small feature released today is a new email subject line option. You now have the choice of customizing the email subject line to read "Feed Name - Post Title", like so:

We appreciate all the great feedback and suggestions so far!

Update 2/11/10: We just added support so that you can change from monthly billing to annual billing in your account on the "Your Plan" page instead of having to ask us to change it.

Jan 10, 2010 Feed My Inbox

8 Comments

Feed My Inbox 2.0 is Launched!

Launching Feed My Inbox 2.0 had many bumps today, but it's finally live. Thanks so much for your patience while the service was down most of the day.

Many more details about the site will be posted here in the coming weeks, but right now we're only going to cover the most important stuff.

Accounts have new passwords

All account passwords in the old and new system are encrypted in the database. We can't even see them. Since version 2.0 is a completely different platform with new code and so forth, we were not able to migrate over the passwords to the new database.

What's that mean? We had to reset account passwords and there are two ways to get in your account:

Use the forgot your password link and the password will be reset then emailed to you. Upon logging in for the first time you will be asked to create your own new password.
As I write this we are sending an email to every customer that has a Feed My Inbox account. The email will contain information about the new version along with their new account password.

Sorry about that folks, but we really had no way around this one if we wanted to keep account information 100% secure.

Enjoy the new site!

We worked extremely hard on the new website and account area. It's a great foundation for all the cool things we have planned in 2010. Go check it out!

Dec 17, 2009 Feed My Inbox

6 Comments

Feed My Inbox 2.0 launches January 9

Over the last few months our team has been hard at work on a new version of Feed My Inbox, adding many of the most popular feature requests we hear from our customers. We've also decided on the best way to monetize the application (aka recoup server costs for the last 14 months).

We are REALLY proud of how it has come together. The official launch will be on January 9, 2010, but for now we've put together a one-page website to tell you all about it and answer some questions. Let the countdown begin!

http://www.feedmyinbox.com/v2

Nov 6, 2009 Feed My Inbox

Make a Comment

Personalized Feed Recommendations with SuggestRSS

Recently a service popped up that is really great for finding personalized feed recommendations based on feeds that you are already subscribed to. It's called SuggestRSS. Simply upload your OPML file (see below for instructions on getting it from Feed My Inbox), and their engine will recommend other blogs and feeds you are likely to enjoy.

Here is a little sample of what it looks like:

SuggestRSS

How to get your OPML file from Feed My Inbox

Login to your account
Click on Tools in the main account menu
Click the link to "Export your feeds as an OPML file", and it will download to your computer

Currently SuggestRSS is free to use, a great little tool for finding other interesting stuff to subscribe to!

Oct 26, 2009 Feed My Inbox

1 Comment

New Feature: RSS Cloud Support

In the world of RSS feeds, one thing missing from the beginning has been support for real-time notifications. Until recently, any feed reader (Feed My Inbox in our case) has to manually go check a feed for updates on a regular basis. That is, unless it is being notified through a pinging service.

We've been testing "real-time" emails on Feed My Inbox for a while. Anyone that sends us an email (help(at)feedmyinbox.com) and requests to receive their updates in real-time rather than once per day can try it. The problem is that our system only gets around to checking a feed roughly every 3-4 hours for updates, so it is not truly real-time.

Over the last several months, two extensions to the RSS protocol have been made available, which allow real-time "pushing" of new feed content to third party services (like ours). They are RSS Cloud and PubSubHubbub. We plan on supporting both, but decided to start with RSS Cloud.

We deployed support for RSS Cloud a couple of weeks ago. Already over 2,000 feeds in our system are cloud-enabled, with that number growing every day. Cloud-enabled feeds will "push" new feed content to our service immediately, allowing the updates sent to subscribers to be truly real-time.

Dave Winer is the guy behind RSS Cloud and literally wrote the book on the RSS specification almost nine years ago. Wordpress is the first major supporter, and all 7.5 million blogs hosted on Wordpress.com are already cloud-enabled. If you self-host a version of Wordpress, there's a plugin to help.

How do I know if my feed is supported?

Look at your feed's source code. Cloud-enabled feeds have a tag like this at the top:

Can I implement this into my feed(s)?

Yes, but doing so is rather technical in nature. Here are a few resources to get you going:

We're so excited to bring these protocols to you, as we feel it's a huge step in the evolution of RSS (and Atom) feeds.

Oct 1, 2009 Feed My Inbox

4 Comments

Feed My Inbox in 52 languages!

Today we deployed support for 52 languages (and counting) on Feed My Inbox. Actually, it only took about 10 minutes thanks to a new tool from Google Translate! At the bottom of all pages on FeedMyInbox.com, you will now see a dropdown to select an available language. Select one and the page is translated for you! Here is what it looks like in French:

We hope it helps our friends in the 185+ countries now using Feed My Inbox!

Aug 24, 2009 Feed My Inbox

2 Comments

How to Subscribe to Password-Protected Feeds with Feed My Inbox

This morning we received a great question from a customer asking how to subscribe to a private or password-protected feed. That's a great question we hear quite often, so we thought it would be valuable to post it here on the blog.

Method 1

What seems to work best in our experience is to modify the URL of the feed to include your username/password. Here is what it should look like:

https://[username]:[password]@[domain]/[path]

An example with fake values filled in would look something like this:

https://admin:testing@brightwurks.com/rss.xml

Simply type that into Feed My Inbox, and it works like magic. We know this is tested and works well for web apps with protected feeds, like those from 37signals, as covered on their product blog a while back.

Method 2

If you are not so keen about having your username/password as part of the URL and would rather have a feed URL you can share with others, FreeMyFeed.com is definitely worth a shot. Simply type in your feed URL, username and password, then they will generate a NEW URL that does not have any login information in it, like so: http://freemyfeed.com/feed/SPGadlaeK1291JA91LAMadmaldkfdls= (just an example).

The only potential downfall to Free My Feed would be depending on their website to be up and working properly in order to get updates from your feed.

We hope this helps, just let us know if you have any questions.

Aug 19, 2009 Feed My Inbox

10 Comments

Feed My Inbox turns 1!

One year ago today, we launched this little idea called Feed My Inbox, a simple RSS to email application. We never set out to re-invent the wheel ... only to grease it up so that it worked a hell of a lot better.

To say we've been surprised by the popularity and growth of Feed My Inbox over the last year would be a serious understatement. It's been tons of fun, and the app is something our team is fully dedicated to for many more birthdays.

We are so grateful to all of the people that use this service. Here are some statistics of what happened behind-the-scenes over the last year:

Unique Visitors- 131,134
Pageviews- 550,599

Active accounts- 34,727
Feeds we're tracking- 56,606
Confirmed subscriptions- 66,840
Emails sent- 3,077,382
Feed entries emailed- 33,771,734

Service Outages- 37 (most of them less than 5 minutes)
Uptime- 99.91%
* We're getting better at this!

Although the application looks pretty much the same to you, under the hood it is literally 100% different. We have learned a lot along the way and are now to the point where we can scale this thing for the long haul.

I also wanted to give you an update on where we hope Feed My Inbox is headed in the next year. Putting this in writing is serious business, so we fully intend to live up to the following:

1. New features are on the way

We are currently working on the next big version of Feed My Inbox, which will bring many of the feature requests we have collected over the last year to light. We are not close enough to say when it will be launched, but it is officially a work in progress. Stay tuned to the blog for the first announcement.

2. We heart webmasters

Since we announced that webmasters can embed a sign-up form on their website that ties to Feed My Inbox, tools for you to see subscribers and have more control over outgoing emails have been sorely lacking. We have not forgotten about you, and over the next year we'll be bringing some game-changing stuff your way that no other RSS to Email provider can do.

3. We're listening

Our small team is BIG on customer service. We answer all emails and keep a close eye on the support discussions over at Get Satisfaction. If you have any feedback, questions, suggestions or constructive criticism, don't hesitate to send it our way.

Jul 28, 2009 Feed My Inbox

Make a Comment

Emails Delayed this Morning (July 28th)

Hey everyone! This is a quick note to let you know that Feed My Inbox emails did not go out at the normal time this morning due to a little blip with our system. The issue is fixed and emails are going out as we speak. You should receive all your notifications by 11am CST today. Thanks!

« Older Posts Newer Posts »