Blog
All going well
This is an update post as I haven't posted in a few days. Basically, Feed Digest is running great, development work continues, and well, keep looking out for new features which will be cropping up soon!
Users and donations. Feed Digest is not quite two weeks old yet, and we already have well over 1000 new users to add to the *Digest fold. Thanks for your e-mails, suggestions, and ideas everyone. I also want to especially thank those of you who have bought Basic or Plus accounts. You're helping FeedDigest grow. I don't have much money (yet!) so every cent has been appreciated and will be put to good use.
Blog mentions. For some reason, the RSS Weblog hasn't picked us up yet, even though I sent them a note a week or so ago. If you have a spare couple of minutes, send them a tip and let them know how hard I'm working out here :-) Thanks! I'm kinda amazed how some of these sites aren't so up to date, but I've riffed on that before :) The coverage on other blogs continues with a growing pace, however, with some really nice posts turning up. Again, thanks!
GB2312 support. GB2312 has been removed temporarily as there were problems using it as an output encoding. It should be okay for incoming, though, but I haven't fully tested this. I also plan to add support for several more output encodings shortly, though most are supported for incoming.
FeedDigest’s AdWords experiment
I've found a way to get the word about FeedDigest up on blogs (of my own choice) who aren't even linking here, but whose visitors might be interested. Find out how..
ResearchBuzz and rights issues
One of my most respected sources, ResearchBuzz, has reviewed FeedDigest. You can trust Tara to tell it like it is, and she holds no punches. Her points are valid, although most have valid background reasons I had to rationalize during the development. Still, I'll be taking it on board and making the user experience even better. Thanks, Tara.
In other news, I found a nice German review. Babelfish did a reasonable job on it, and they raise an important issue.. make sure you're allowed to syndicate the feeds in your digests! I will be stressing this a lot more in future iterations of the system, as well as integrating the rights management in Atom a bit more.
Automatic upgrade now open!
You can now upgrade your FeedDigest account without having to e-mail me. It should all be automatic once payment has been processed. If not, you can always e-mail me, but it seems good. I'm letting it slide out slowly and without too much fanfare so that I can see how it goes. So, if you've been waiting to upgrade, now's your chance! :)
“Live items” only; more encodings
Show Only Live Items.. Feed Digest archives the feeds it crawls. This means that even if a feed no longer contains a certain entry, if it once contained that entry, we still have it on record. This can come in handy if you're running a large digest with feeds which update very regularly. It's not so great, however, when you expect the digest to ONLY show items which are CURRENTLY in the feed.. for example, if you're showing some of your del.icio.us links, you delete one, and wonder why its still in your digest! The solution is now here.. edit your digest and tick "Show only live items", and Feed Digest will only show items that are currently in your source feeds. To get back the full archive, untick it again.
Encodings.. We now support outputting digests using the following encodings: UTF-8 (Generic / Unicode), ISO-8859-1 (European), GB2312 (Simplified Chinese) properly, ISO-8859-6 (Arabic), ISO-8859-8 (Hebrew), CP1251 (Cyrillic / Russian). More testing is required, so make sure you report any anomalies to me.
Nice quotes
"Feed Digest is by far the one tool that is going to blow all the others away" - Library Clips
".. another gee-whiz step forward in how I experience the net[.]" - iMakeContent.net
"If you have a website, you must try FeedDigest!" - Nick Gray
"Feed Digest Rulez!" - The Bayonet Blog
"[..] great features for those wanting to put RSS feeds on their sites [..]" - Pip Wilson
"Now, publishing feeds on your site is even easier!" - Marnie Webb
"[W]hat's not to love about a service whose slogan is "Making your feeds fabulous"?" - Tara Calishain, ResearchBuzz
More mentions
A review from iMakeContent, an annoucement from PakPromo, a mention in a really cool Italian blog, a Chinese review from Ken Lee (anyone translate?), some nice words from heyblog, and Nick Gray calls me a one-man design rock star! Thanks guys!
Now I'm waiting for the bigger, slower weblogs to catch up :) They get snowed with submissions so they can't respond as quickly as the little guys, unfortunately. It's definitely interesting to see, because weblogs were once the fast way of spreading news compared to print.. but the most successful weblogs are now quite slow and becoming print-like organizations. Time for a revolution? I think del.icio.us/popular is the real source for what's hot now.
Dupe filter
You can now change an option on your digests so that duplicate posts are automatically removed for you. You can choose to have items with either dupliate titles (post names) or duplicate URLs removed. This feature is available to everyone immediately, and if you edit your existing digests you can turn it on, though, by default, the feature is off on all existing and new digests.
Chinese digesters rejoice
GB2312 encoded output is now an option on your digests. Just edit your digest (or create a new one, if you haven't yet) and select GB2312 from the character encoding drop down. I've been surprised how many Chinese users Feed Digest has accrued over the past few days.. we must have been mentioned on a popular Chinese blog or something. I'm glad that with Feed Digest's superior unicode, utf-8, and now gb2312 support, we can keep them happy.
Want a free upgrade?
Want to upgrade but don't want to spend the cash? I'll upgrade you to the Basic plan ($11.95 value) for free in return for a review on your blog or site. A lot of webmasters have benefited from our free accounts, but if you want to get a better account for free, sending a few new webmasters our way would be awfully appreciated :) This offer is, for now, open to the first ten webmasters who e-mail upgrades@feeddigest.com asking to be upgraded. Make sure to include your username and your blog or site URL.
Andrew Beacock and Technoogle join the list of blogs who've written about FeedDigest. Thanks guys!