RapidFeeds.com

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!

Due to the breakdown and as your old RapidFeeds logins become invalid (as mentioned in the last post) all the old Feed URLs are also no more valid.  To make your old feed URLs work, we request you to please sign up again, re-create your feed and email us (at support@rapidfeeds.com) your old feed URL and the new feed URL (which is created after you re-create your feed.).  Once we receive your email with the above details, all your old feed subscribers will be able to access your re-created feeds.

For any queries in this regard, please feel free to contact us at support@rapidfeeds.com or using the Contact Us form and we’ll revert back to your queries promptly.

We highly regret the inconvenience caused.

Due to the breakdown a couple of weeks ago (please see: The Breakdown) your old RapidFeeds accounts (created before July 28, 2006) are no more valid.  We request you to please sign up again to use RapidFeeds services.  You can sign up using the same email address as you did earlier.  If you have any queries in this regard, please contact us at support@rapidfeeds.com, or using the Contact Us form and we’ll promptly revert back to your queries.

We regret the inconvenience caused.

We still find it hard to assimilate the fact of the tragic breakdown and the loss RapidFeeds and its users have suffered, and it is with a mixed feeling we announce the RapidFeeds’ comeback.

Thanks very much to all the users for extending your support and encouragement to us when we were down.  Your optimistic response played an important role in bringing back our services to the RSS community.

It is nice to see the database filling up rapidly with signups following the re-launch.  This shows the users’ faith in our services; and not to let you users down ever again, and as promised, we have worked hard through these couple of weeks making RapidFeeds a very reliable and dependable service.  Not to mention, our hard work is going to continue toward our objective of making RapidFeeds the best and the user-friendliest RSS solutions provider over the Internet – and now, also the most reliable.

As a response to the catastrophic breakdown due to data loss, we have beefed-up our database back-up system to a great extent and now every bit of your data is being securely stored in multiple locations at an interval of every 12 hours.  This completely eliminates the risk of any kind of data loss in future.  Also, we have now hooked up the website to higher configuration and better servers to meet the huge traffic demand and to provide you an uninterrupted and swift service.

We have received a few emails from our users of some issues they have come across using the service.  As this is a new beginning, and as we are still testing, there might be a thing or two we might have missed on due to which you may face a minor technical difficulty.  Please let us know of any problem you encounter using the services and we’ll fix it at the highest priority.

Happy Syndication!

We don’t know how to put this forward and extend our profound apology to the entire RSS community. As you all know RapidFeeds has had a great fall a few days ago. This is a very unfortunate situation for Rapidfeeds and its users. On July 28, RapidFeeds abruptly crashed and knocked us for six. It has left us perplexed and deeply moved, and we know it has been the same with our over 10,700 members.

The fate had its beginning on July 20 when we started receiving emails from our subscribers notifying us of some connection errors. This was due to increasing traffic and so we decided to upgrade our servers as to be able to handle heavier traffic. We never knew we would lose everything in the process. Our hosting company came back saying that the entire website got deleted; even the backups.

This came to us as a shock of our lives. We were literally traumatized. We have devoted one and a half years to RapidFeeds; never saw it as a profit-making machine; have run it as a free service but never treated as one; and have always been prompt in customer support and served them with full dedication. This was the first and the most important project of our lives. And we are just not able to stand the shock.

It is with a heavy heart we say to our users that we have lost the entire database and all the feeds. We know that this is a big loss to you, but unfortunately there is nothing we can do about it now. We employed all our resources and tried our best to retrieve everything but could only get our hands on the code – thanks to the regular back-ups of the code we used to maintain on our personal computers. However, we relied on the servers for the database back-ups for its increasing size; and this is the biggest mistake we made.

What’s next?

We’ve decided to put the website back afresh in a few days. But this time, on much reliable and powerful servers. The jolt has taught us a great deal about the trade and you can take our words for it that we’ll now be more reliable and dependable than ever before. We are dedicating a team to manage such risks in future and will have contingency plans in place.

We wish a wholehearted thanks to all the users for your support and patience. There is nothing in words for us to express our regret to you, but we promise not to give you a second chance to complain. We truly value your relationship with us and hope to see you back online.

If you have anything to say, or wish to contact us for any reason, please feel free to email us at breakdown@rapidfeeds.com. Looking forward to your emails…

Regards,
Malik Mairaj
Akram Quraishi
Co-founders - RapidFeeds.com

P.S.: We haven’t received, in the last few days, any of the emails sent to us on our rapidfeeds.com email addresses as the website was completely down. This is the reason your emails might have bounced back or you haven’t heard from us in replies. We are sorry for the inconvenience caused. You can now send us emails on the address mentioned above.