Archive for the ‘General’ Category

Now own your Feed completely with the Branded Feed URLs

Tuesday, 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!

Upcoming Features and Service Enhancements

Wednesday, 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!

Give us 5 minutes to take this survey

Wednesday, March 31st, 2010

We are trying to identify areas of potential improvement in our services and best ways to implement the next steps to enhance the user experience and provide even more robust and reliable service to our loyal users. Our next steps may effect many of our users and we wouldn’t want to do this before consulting you.  Your insight and feedback is crucial to help guide us in taking RapidFeeds to the next level so please give us not more than 5 minutes to take this survey and voice your opinion.

Please click the link below to take the survey.

http://survey.io/survey/3f5ea

Thank you very much!
RapidFeeds Team

A very Happy New Year 2008!

Tuesday, January 1st, 2008

As 2007 winds to a close and we get ready to welcome 2008, we wanted to take a moment to thank all our users and wish a very happy and a prosperous new year!

2007 has been a great year at RapidFeeds. We have successfully introduced numerous features in our services like password protection of feeds, iTunes and Creative Commons support, OPML for feeds, in-depth feed statistics, custom MySite templates and several others, and have received a great response to all our efforts.  We have also introduced our first premium package and are astound with the response we are receiving to it. 

We see 2008 as an even more active year with many more useful and interesting features lined up for release.  We are determined to continue our hard work to give you the best we can and promise to work on all the possible suggestions and feedback you have for us.

MySite Pro Free Trial:
And now, to start with this prosperous year, we would like to introduce a 15 day free trial of MySite Pro.  This is for all the users who have not yet subscribed to this package and would like to try it before they do.  If you are interested then shoot us an email at support@rapidfeeds.com to request this trial.

Please go to the MySite Pro page and subscribe to the MySite Pro package with a 15 day trial.

Once again, we wish you a very happy new year!

Enjoy!