RapidFeeds Blog

We are very glad with the successful launch of MySite Pro and its great response!  We don’t have enough words to express our thankfulness to all those who have supported RapidFeeds with their donations, small and large.  Today, as promised earlier, we are closing down the donations.  Also, we would like to give all the donors a small token of thanks by offering them a free subscription of the MySite Pro service!

It is going to work this way:

Every donor will get a free MySite Pro account for a period equivalent to the amount he has donated, plus a two months bonus subscription!  For example: If you have donated a total of say about $100, you are entitled for a 22 month ($100 donated / $4.49 subscription fee) + 2 months bonus subscription which comes to a total of 24 months!

So all the RapidFeeds supporters out there, what are you waiting for?  Go ahead and send us an email at donations@rapidfeeds.com if you would like to take this offer and give us the opportunity to show our gratitude!

Once again, thanks for your support!

There have been so many requests from our users, since the launch of MySite, for an option to remove the Credit Note (Powered by RapidFeeds) Link from the MySite widgets on a chargeable basis and a few other features; but we had some goals to attain before we could do this.  Today, we are glad to let you all know that we are now able to make it available to you!  We are today rolling out the Pro version of MySite!

Our services till now have been very successful and we thank all our users to bring them to this level.  RapidFeeds is really evolving and this was not possible without the faith our users have shown in our services all along the way and chosen us as their trusted partner for their RSS requirements.  And now, we are on the edge of rolling out our premium features and take RapidFeeds to the next level.

So what is MySite Pro?

MySite Pro is the premium version of MySite which is a powerful yet very easy to use syndication tool to display any RSS or Atom feed on your web pages and/or virally spread your content to bring back huge traffic to your website by allowing others to display your feeds on their websites with a link back to yours – all with a few clicks!

The Pro version is made available for those users who want an Ads Free and Fully Customizable– in short “fully owned” MySite Widgets, for a small fee.  With MySite Pro you get an Ads Free, Fully Customizable and Credit Note Free re-syndication service.   For more details please visit the details page here.

So, if you want that full control over the MySite Widgets you create, then go ahead and sign up for the Pro version today.  But if you are happy with the free version, you may please continue to use it as it remains free all the time.

We hope this release will make many of our users delighted and strengthen our relations further.

Enjoy the Pro!

Today we bring to you a small update suggested by a few of our users – The ability to manage feeds in local time zone. So far you could schedule feed items to be added / updated on the feeds on a later date / time. However, you could schedule the items only in the default time zone and had to manually calculate and adjust the time difference to your local time zone.

With this update released, you now have the ability to manage the feeds in your own time zone. All you need to do is set the time zone of your preference just once for a given feed and everything else will be taken care thereof. Here’s how you can do that:

Go to the Feed Configuration page (click on the ‘configure’ link in your FeedManager home) , then select the “Optionals” tab from the “Advanced” box at the bottom, choose your preferred time zone from the list in the “Time Zone” drop down and click the “Save Changes” button. And voila! You are done! From this point your feed will be managed in the time zone specified.

Hope this feature will be helpful to our users from different parts of the globe.

We are thankful to you all for giving us your valuable suggestions and feedback. We take all the feedback seriously and try our best to improve our services accordingly. So please keep sending in your suggestions at feedback@rapidfeeds.com.

Enjoy!

A hearty hello to you all! Here is a post after a long long time. You might have seen a lot of small improvements in our services all this while but there hasn’t been a post about them here. We kind of abandoned this blog. Yes? Well, we agree. But not any more! We’ll try our best to keep this up to date with all the news and updates we have – and there’s a lot!

To start with, we have an interesting update for our MySite users. The long awaited Customizable Templates are here! Now this means you can create your own Custom MySite templates using HTML and CSS to blend them perfectly into your websites. And not just that, you can also allow others to use your distinguished template to re-syndicate your feed.

So please go ahead and check this feature out on the “MySite Configuration” page (can be accessed from the “configure” link in your MySite account)! The help page for the template tags is here: MySite Template Tags Help.

Please do feel free to email us any questions you have at support@rapidfeeds.com, and as always, keep sending in your suggestions and requests. We’ll try as much we can to give you all the features you would like to see.

Happy Templating!

Here comes one of the major and interesting new features your way!  We are very glad to announce the Beta release of Advanced Statistics for your feeds.  This much-awaited feature has a lot to offer in respect of feed metrics.  Now every trail of your feeds is being recorded for you to see where your feed subscribers come from, what Aggregators / User Agents they use, number of hits the feed receives, average subscribers for a given month or subscribers on a given date and item level referrers!  And… this is just the beginning! 

Yes, there’s a lot more to come in terms of enhancements and usability of your feed statistics plus a few more insights into your feed usage very soon.  But until then, for a quick overview of the features in this release see the breakdown below.

We have been testing this feature online for about two months and have collected your feed metrics for the same period.  The old metrics system has been replaced by the new one and is accessible thru the same ‘Track’ button in your FeedManager Home.  Once you click on the Track button against a particular feed, you’ll reach the Advanced Feed Statistics page of that feed where you’ll find the following tabs.

Daily Stats:  Here you’ll find day-wise feed metrics like number of Subscribers, Click Thrus and Hits your feed received on a particular day.  We have put up a simple and neat Bar Chart to represent the Day-Wise Subscriber Trend and a Table for all the details.

Monthly Stats:  This gives you the number of Average Monthly Subscribers for your feed, total number of Click Thrus and Hits on a month on month basis again represented with an easy to understand Bar Chart for Subscriber Trend and Table for details.
 
Geo Stats:  This interesting part of the Advanced Stats shows which part of the world your feed subscribers come from, represented in a simple table, which lists country names, their respective flags and number of subscribers from each country.

User Agent Stats:  If you are interested in knowing what Feed Readers / Aggregators your subscribers are using to read your feed, or, to know what other user agents are being used to access your feed then this is the place where you can find this information.  It’ll give you the details like number of subscribers (if applicable) and hits your feed received from each of the User agents, represented in a simple expandable / collapsible Table.

Item Stats:  Finally, Item Stats gives you the details like number of Click Thrus for each item, Referrer Details and number of Hits from each of the referrers for a given period of time.

A lot of effort has been put in and quite an amount of time invested for the accuracy of stats and to make its presentation as user-friendly as possible.  All this towards providing our users the most reliable feed metrics system and best experience using our services.  And of course, this was not possible without the continued feedback and suggestions we receive from our users.  We really appreciate all your input and would like to heartily thank all our users for using our services and for helping us achieve new milestones.  We hope you’ll find this new feature useful and let us know how we can further improve it.

Happy Tracking!

In our bid to continuously improve the usability of our services we are trying to make available to you even those small little features that can enrich your experience with our products and can ease your life to that little more extent.  And one such feature that we just finished adding is Auto-Discover capability in MySite.  Now, adding a feed to your MySite for re-syndication is even easier.  With the Auto-Discover capability, MySite can now automatically discover the feeds of any blog or the feeds on any web page that you want to re-syndicate.   All you need to do is simply submit the blog’s or the web page’s URL to MySite and the associated feed will be added!

The Auto-Discover mechanism works with the web pages with a <link> element between their <head> and </head> tags specifying the associated feed details. For example, the auto-discover code for this blog’s feed is:

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”rapidfeeds.com RSS Feed” href=”http://rapidfeeds.com/blog/?feed=rss2” />

between the <head> and </head> tags of this document.  Almost all aggregators are capable of discovering the feed with this method.

Note to the FeedManager Users:  You can always find the auto-discover code for your feeds on the Publish Feed page in your RapidFeeds Manager Account.  It is always advisable to add this code to the associated web pages.

Happy Syndication!

P.S.: There is a lot of action going on in our workshop.  So stay tuned for more updates coming your way.

We are working hard to make RapidFeeds even more useful to you by adding new features and enhancing the existing ones; and it’s your constant feedback that’s helping us reach the excellence.  So keep posting in with your valuable suggestions and feedbacks and help us serve you better and better.  However, we request you to please forgive us if we fail to respond to any of your suggestion emails.  We hope you understand that we receive so many emails everyday and sometimes it becomes difficult to answer all of them.  But that doesn’t mean your email is not read.  We really spend time to carefully read each and every email we receive, as those are valuable assets to us and can never be ignored.

We would like to thank you for all your suggestions and will keep looking forward for more and more and more…!

Here we are, back again with another little update for you – The OPML Feeds!

OPML is a way to distribute hierarchical list of information, often used to list multiple RSS feeds in a single feed so that the users can simply add this one parent feed to subscribe to all the feeds listed in it in one go.   It is useful if you want your users to be able to subscribe to a bunch of feeds (say under one category) at a time rather adding all of them individually to their readers.  The OPML format is supported by almost all the feed aggregators.

So now, if you wish to give your users a single OPML feed to allow them to subscribe to all of your feeds in your RapidFeeds account at once, simply click on the OPML hyperlink on the top right hand corner of your FeedManager Home, select the Chicklet you like and copy paste the code on the desired web page!  Your users will then be able to add all your feeds to their aggregators at once by simply adding this one OPML feed.

More updates coming soon…

Happy syndication!

We are glad to announce a few of the much demanded add-ons for your feeds. Now you can include iTunes support and Creative Commons License in your feeds with a mouse click. Also, if you have been thinking to provide only authorized access to your feeds, you can now do that easily with the new Password Protect feature. How? Read below…

Adding iTunes Support: On the Feed Configuration page click on the “iTunes” tab on the left menu under “Add-ons”. On the form that appears to your right, select “Include” and fill the following form.

You can select a category for your feed from the “Category” drop down at the bottom of the form and then select a sub-category from the list that appears in the “Sub Categories” box below. To select multiple sub categories, simply hold the Ctrl button and you can make a multiple selection with your mouse. Once done selecting the sub categories, click the “Add >>” button to add them to “Your Selection” box. At any point of time if you wish to remove any added category, simply select the category you wish to remove from the “Your Selection” box and click on the “<< Remove" button. Do not forget to click the "Save Changes" button in the end. Adding Creative Commons: On the Feed Configuration page click on the “Creative Commons” tab on the left menu under “Add-ons”. On the form that appears to your right, select “include”. Then select the desired options from the form below and click “Save Changes” and you are done!

Adding Password Protection: As with the above two options you’ll find “Password Protect” tab under “Security” on your Feed Configuration page. Click this to reveal the form for setting the credentials. Then select “Include” and fill in the desired Username and Password for your feed. Once done, click the “Save Changes” button to save them.

Note:

• At any point of time if you do not wish to use any of the above features simply select the “Do not Include” Radio button on the respective form and click “Save Changes”.
• For information on any of the form fields please hover your mouse pointer on the icon.

P.S.: Stay tuned, more updates are coming soon…

Here’s a quick note and best wishes for the New Year to all our users. It’s been a few moons you have seen any major updates but we promise 2007 is going to be an absolute opposite. It is going to be full of life with many updates and some major features and services creeping in. To start with, there is a major update awaiting launch few days ahead and a bunch of little updates will be popping throughout the first two months. We are all set for a heavy workout at our workshop to roll out some major additions to the services later into the year and thru the end of 2007 we aim to develop RapidFeeds into a more complete Feed Management Solution and beyond.

So stay tuned and have a prosperous and a “feedy” year 2007!