RapidFeeds.com

Feed Stats Service Upgraded!

Malik Mairaj — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 09:05:19 EST

In our humble bid to keep most of our services free, there comes a lot many challenges our way - while the rapidly multiplying traffic and the increasing adoption of our services by publishers across the globe shows the fruit our efforts bear, there comes with it the heavy costs of bandwidth and costs to upgrade the hardware and the software from time to time to keep with the pace. Nevertheless, our commitment to serve the users using our free services is always been appreciated by them - and we thank each of you for your support all the way long.

A few of you have experienced some problems with your feed stats in the last couple of weeks which was mainly due to the heavily increased traffic we are experiencing and we apologize for the same. But the good news is that, we have upgraded this service to handle the traffic of this next level of our journey and you should see this problem no more!

Happy Tracking!

Broadening the coverage of User Agents for more accurate Stats

Malik Mairaj — Sun, 14 Dec 2008 05:52:29 EST

You might see a sudden increase in your feed traffic in the next few days. Please be happy that there is nothing wrong with our stats system and all that traffic is genuine. You might see this sudden plunge in subscriptions and traffic to your feeds as we are broadening the coverage of User Agents. This is a routine at the backend to include in our stats system the new User Agents from time to time as they become more popular to track subscriptions and hits from them. However, this time around there are more than a few User Agents that we are adding to our database and this might make your graphs surge a little if your users are using these agents. Also, for the few users for whom the Google Reader subscriptions were not showing up, the good news is that this is now fixed and you should be able to see the subscriptions and hits coming from the Google Reader to your feeds.

Cheers

New and Improved Help Center Your Way!

Malik Mairaj — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 16:01:13 EST

In our quest to serve you better and better, we have totally revamped the Help Center and made it much more user friendly and useful. This update was pushed a few weeks ago and was being tested so some of the users might have already noticed the change! Now you can find all the help you need with RapidFeeds documented in this space here: http://www.rapidfeeds.com/docs/ - bookmark it now!

We tried to cover most of the topics in these documents, but if you feel something is missing, please feel free to request the inclusion by sending an email to suggestions@rapidfeeds.com. We’ll be adding and updating the documents to this space as and when required.

Cheers!

A very Happy New Year 2008!

Akram Quraishi — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 10:53:56 EST

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!

Thanks to all the donors

Akram Quraishi — Mon, 17 Dec 2007 06:40:26 EST

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!

Now fully own your MySite widget - Go MySite Pro!

Malik Mairaj — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 19:18:55 EST

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!

Now manage your feeds in your own Time Zone

Malik Mairaj — Tue, 27 Nov 2007 08:04:29 EST

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!

Custom MySite Templates are here!

Malik Mairaj — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 14:01:52 EST

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!

Now track in-depth feed usage with Advanced Feed Statistics

Malik Mairaj — Sun, 18 Feb 2007 19:26:17 EST

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!

MySite can now Auto-Discover Feeds!

Malik Mairaj — Tue, 30 Jan 2007 19:30:37 EST

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.