Back from the scheduled down time!

January 21st, 2012

We are glad to let you know that we are back from our scheduled down time. However, as we have had expected, migrating our services was not as simple due to the technically advanced nature. We’d also like to let you know that we were not able to complete the migration process fully due to some unforseen issues. Rest assured, our service is fully back and functional for now. You may however encounter few very minor interuptions in the service in the coming days as we would continue to complete the migration process, though, we’ll do everything we can to minimize any of it. Hope you’ll bear with us. Please feel free to email us at support@rapidfeeds.com for anything!

Cheers!

Scheduled Downtime – Saturday, January 21, 2012

January 18th, 2012

Here comes a quick and an exciting announcement your way!  We are very glad to let you know that we are migrating our services to our new and shiny Cloud based servers.  Our traffic has grown multitudes in the past year and our current servers are finding it difficult to handle all of it and so the decision.  This migration would mean an improved performance and faster service going forward.  Employing cloud based servers also mean that we’ll be able to expand our resources in the future without requiring long downtimes.  However, for the current migration we’ve planned a 12 hour downtime — from 10:30 AM to 10:30 PM IST (01:00 AM to 01:00 PM EDT) on Saturday, January 21, 2012.  We hope you will bear with us.

Thanks!

Scheduled Downtime – Sunday, July 25

July 23rd, 2010

We are planning a scheduled downtime on Sunday, July 25 for regular maintenance purposes. Our services will be intermittently unavailable from 10:30 AM to 02:30 PM IST (01:00 A.M. to 05:00 A.M. EDT). Hope you will bear with us.

Thanks!

Important: Freemium Model Takes Effect in the Next 48 Hours

July 4th, 2010

The following is applicable only to the users who have not upgraded their FeedManager accounts to any of the paid packages yet.

As mentioned in one of our earlier posts, the FeedManager accounts of all the users who did not susbscibe to a paid package will be automatically converted to the “FeedManager Free” package. This will happen within the next 48 hours.

What this means to those who are effected by this change is that all the feeds in your FeedManager account, except the latest one (latest determined by creation date) will be automatically disabled and you’ll not be able to use them or execute any functions like edit, add item, update etc. on them, although you’ll still see them in your FeedManager account.  Also, all the advanced features which are not part of the “FeedManager Free” package (see details) will be automatically disabled for your (one) active feed as well.

We’ll however, for the next 30 days, preserve all your disabled feeds and their settings as they are and you can re-activate them and start using them again by subscribing to a paid package of your choice within this 30 day grace period.  However, if “FeedManager Free” package suffice your needs and you choose not to upgrade your account within the grace period, then all of the disabled feeds in your account (excluding the latest one that remains active) will be deleted forever and cannot be recovered in the future.  We would like to reiterate, if you do not upgrade your FeedManager account to a paid package even within the grace period, then all of the disabled feeds in your account (excluding the latest one that remains active) will be deleted forever and cannot be recovered in the future.

Note: In case you do not want the latest feed in your account to be active, but instead, you want some other feed in its place, then please email us before August 1, 2010 at support@rapidfeeds.com with “Change Default Feed” in the subject line and mention in your email the following details:

  1. Your email address you use to sign in to your RapidFeeds.com account
  2. The Title of the feed you want enabled

and we’ll do the needful.

As usual, please feel free to write to us at support@rapidfeeds.com if you have any questions or need help with your accounts.

Cheers!

P.S.: We highly encourage you to take a look at the recent blogposts discussing the latest feature releases in the past few weeks and the list of interesting and useful features we are currently working on to make FeedManager an even more complete product for your RSS needs.

Now Auto Tweet Your Feed Updates!

June 24th, 2010

We are very glad to bring another valuable feature to all the FeedManager users today – the Auto Tweet. This again is one of the features from our long list of features we have set our focus on developing in the coming months.

As the name suggests, once you enable this feature for a given feed in your FeedManager account, all your updates to that feed will automatically show up in your Twitter timeline. This not only will save you all the time and energy you would spend doing this manually but will also help spread your feed updates virally, and the very instant you publish them!

To enable this must-have feature, please follow the instructions on the Auto Tweet help page.

Please note: This feature is available for Basic and above accounts only.

Happy Feed Tweeting!

Scheduled Downtime – Wednesday, June 16

June 16th, 2010

We are planning a scheduled downtime again on Wednesday, June 16. Our services will be unavailable between 2:30 P.M. to 5:30 P.M. IST (5:00 A.M. to 08:00 A.M. EDT) for maintenance and upgrades. Hope you will bear with us.

Thanks!

Now own your Feed completely with the Branded Feed URLs

May 18th, 2010

We are glad to announce that we are rolling out the “Branded Feed URLs” feature today. This is one of the features from our long list of features we have set our focus on developing in the coming months.

With Branded Feed URLs you can now use your own domain name to distribute your feeds instead of the regular feeds.rapidfeeds.com/{YourFeedId}/ URLs. Although, your feeds will still be hosted with us and nothing changes in the background or the way your RapidFeeds account works, using Branded Feed URLs all your feeds can be made accessible through URLs like feed.yourdomain.com/{YourFeedId}/.

How is it useful?

Branding your feeds and serving them from your own domain name is crucial if you want to retain your feed’s identity, give your feed subscribers a more seamless experience, enhance customer recognition of you brand and cultivate brand loyalty among your customers. This is now possible using the Branded Feed URL feature which gives you greater control over how your subscribers access your feed.

Sounds Interesting!  How can I set up Branded URL for my feed?

Login to your FeedManager account, go to the “Feed Configuration” page for the desired feed, click on the “Branded Feed URL” tab and follow the instructions.

Please note: This feature will be available in all the  Pro and Enterprise accounts only

As always, if you have any questions, suggestions or comments, please write to us at support@rapidfeeds.com

Happy Branding!

Scheduled Downtime – Sunday, April 25

April 21st, 2010

Update: Thanks all for your patience while we upgraded our systems! We really appreciate it!  Everything went as planned (in fact better since we were actually down only for over an hour)!  Everything is now back in place and we are fully up and running.  However, if at all you find any thing fishy happening or broken then please report it to support@rapidfeeds.com.  Thanks again!

We are planning a scheduled downtime on Sunday, April 25. Our services will be unavailable between 10:00 AM to 06:00 PM IST (12:30 A.M. to 08:30 A.M. EDT) for maintenance and upgrades. Hope you will bear with us.

Thanks!

Upcoming Features and Service Enhancements

April 14th, 2010

Following our announcment of the Freemium model for FeedManager, a lot of you have showed interest in knowing more about the features and service enhancements we would be investing in and here is the quick list summed up for you.

Please note that this is not an exhaustive list of items, nor is it in the order of priority. It is just what we have set our focus on for the coming months:

Upcoming Features

* Real-Time Feeds
We will implement technologies like RSSCloud and PubSubHubBub to enable real-time updates for your feeds. This will make your RSS feeds available to your users the very instant you hit the publish button.

* Twitter Updates:
This feature will automate for you the process of posting on Twitter about the new items and podcasts that you add to your RSS feeds from time to time. This surely will make your life easier saving you all the effort you need to go and manually do so.

* Podcast Themes
With this you will have all the new browser friendly styles for your podcasting feeds that would enhance your feeds’ appearance when viewed in different browsers with more organized page style and highlighted subscription options etc. making it even easier for your users to subscribe to your feeds and perhaps increasing the conversion rate.

* Deeper iTunes integration
Once implemented, the item level iTunes tags will also be added in your RSS feed. Specifically, the Podcast media file play-time will be available in the itunes. Moreover, all the info of your files will be automatically calculated and added just like the enclosure details.

* Monetization options for your Feeds
We are exploring all the possibilities and will add monetization support for your feeds whereby you can display advertisements within your feeds and monetize on them.

* Update Feed via Email
This will allow you add items and podcasts to you feeds from anywhere, anytime, by simply sending an email to a given email address using any device. This means you can add items and podcasts to your feeds without even login into your RapidFeeds account!

UI

* User Interface improvements
We have identified many potential areas within the website where we will further improve the UI so that it will save you some clicks, make the interface more intuitive, loads faster etc. This should perhaps make your job on RapidFeeds done even Rapidly!

* Mobile compatible version of RapidFeeds
We’ll be launching this whole new interface for you to be able to use RapidFeeds on your mobile devices with convenience.

Others

* Better Support
We will transition out from Email Support and will set up a Support Ticket System instead. This will enable our support team to prioretize, better track and respond quicker to all your support queries.

* CName
This feature will allow you to brand your feeds by way of customizing your feed URL to your own domain rather than feeds.rapidfeeds.com. Your feeds will still be hosted with us and served from RapidFeeds.com in the backend, but what the user sees is your domain name and not RapidFeeds anywhere. This will also give you a permanent URL for your feeds that’s owned completely by you for ever, wither you use RapidFeeds or not!

* Performance Improvements
We have a lot of backend improvements in our pipeline which would significantly improve various aspects of our applications and uptime. This will ensure you an even better experience using our services apart from robust and reliable service all the time.

* Automatic Backup of Feeds
This will ensure retrieval of your feeds if you happen to accidentally delete them!

* API
Some of you have requested for this but doing this haven’t been feasible for us yet. However, if we receive more requests in the future we may as well release the API for our services. In the meanwhile, please feel free to get in touch with us if you think you have some really cool ideas around it and if we find them interesting we may plan to prioritize this!

* iPhone and other mobile Apps for RapidFeeds
So that you get more options to update your feeds even on the go!

We hope this sounds as exciting to you as it does to us!

We have our ears wide open for any questions, suggestions or concerns you might have. So please feel free to email us at support@rapidfeeds.com for anything that you wish to. We’ll be happy to hear from you!

Free (Default) Package revised. Included iTunes, Scheduling and Password Protection!

April 14th, 2010

Thanks to each one of you who wrote to us with your concerns, requests and suggestions for our Freemium model.  We must say, we were overwhelmed and truly appreciate each one of your emails!

Keep them coming!

From the numerous requests we received, the one that surfaced as the major and the most common among all of you who wished to continue with the Free package was to include the Support for iTunes in it as well. And we are glad to announce that we recognized the need and have revised the Free Package to include not just iTunes, but Scheduling and Password Protection as well!

For those of you who showed interest in knowing about the upcoming features for the paid packages, we have the list almost ready and we’ll post it here shortly.  So stay tuned.

Enjoy the Freemium!