RapidFeeds Blog

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  The old metrics system has been replaced by the new one and is accessible thru the same ‘Track’ button in your FeedManager Home.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!

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!