Our Apologies, We Messed Things Up

To all of our users, both our loyal RSSFWD users, and the new Blogarithm users that recently came on board using our service, we want to first apologize in advance for the lack of service and system performance. Simply put, our migration of Blogarithm could not have gone any worse, and many of you are experiencing extremely poor if any updates and preference management, from our platform.

Due to the overwhelming volume of support emails we apologize if you did not receive a timely response from us. In an effort to try to answer some questions and explain whats happening, here are some facts that hopefully answer the heart of the support emails:

Why is the system not working?

In short, our integration of the Blogarithm user base was very poorly executed. We lacked proper planning, and did not foresee some of the complications that we are currently experiencing. We never assigned dedicated resources to RSSFWD since the system has been stable for the past 4 years. As a result, we were unable to react as quickly as we should have. We apologize for the lack of communication as well over the last few weeks, we know we could have done better here.

Will the service work properly again and if so when?

We are actively working to bring on a dedicated resource to manage RSSFWD. We hope to have this finalized by the end of this week, and quickly get the system back up to par. We will be communicating much more frequently on this blog as we make progress in this realm and will keep you all updated. You can now follow us for updates on twitter as well at http://www.twitter.com/rssfwd.

Where the heck are my feeds?

Some of you have experienced error pages and messages saying that you do not have your subscriptions. Rest assured, they are still in the database and will be available as soon as possible. We know this has been a concern for many of you, and again, we apologize for this inconvenience and are actively working to fix this issue.

We cant express enough apologies for the inconvenience in powering your subscriptions. We understand that we have lost and may continue to lose many users as a result of this service disruption, and can only hope that we can be worthy of a second look when the system is fixed and improved with new features.

To the incoming Blogarithm users, what can we say? We messed up. We know things changed for you and fast, and the transition was less than graceful. We apologize for this inconvenience and hope that we get the chance to show you that we really are a lot better than this.

For those of you who are bearing this out with us, we will be back soon, we promise! We appreciate your dedication and support as we work to get RSSFWD back!

– RSSFWD Team

Welcome Blogarithm Users!

We apologize for keeping our blog dusty over the past few months. We have been working hard on many different projects and have frankly been pretty bad about keeping up with posting updates, and the development pipeline for RSSFWD.

That said, in an effort to catch up, we would first like to welcome the users of Blogarithm to the RSSFWD platform!

As many of you know, RSSFWD acquired the Blogarithm service earlier this year. You can see the official press release on our parent site here.

We have been busy over the past few months preparing for an integration of all Blogarithm users to migrate over to RSSFWD. That transition was just activated yesterday (again sorry for all of you Blogarithm users for the late blog post). For those of you that potentially missed the alert emails and updates, I will post the most recent one below:

Dear Blogarithm Subscriber,

We hope you are doing well! As you may recall, the Blogarithm service was acquired earlier this year by Blue Sky Factory, Inc. The same group that runs the similar service RSSFWD (www.rssfwd.com). We wanted to alert you to some upcoming changes to the Blogarithm service that will require some awareness and some minor changes, to ensure that your content continues to be delivered in a timely fashion.

Starting on May 20, Blogarithm‘s blog / site updates will be delivered by the RSSFWD.com platform moving forward. We are excited about this transition, and are looking forward to consolidating all of our users on one common platform to power your RSS to email needs.

In advance of this transition, we would like you to be aware of a few changes that will affect your service:

1. Please add rssfwd@rssfwd.com to your safe sender / whitelist to ensure continued delivery of your subscriptions. All new subscription delivery will come from this address moving forward.

2. Any website that you are currently subscribed to that does not have an RSS feed will no longer be monitored by the system. RSSFWD.com has auto-discovery of RSS feeds, so if you are not sure if a site that you subscribe to has a RSS feed or not, you can simply type in the URL in RSSFWD and it will do the detection for you.

3. As a result of the transition, the existing “Blogroll” and “Related blogs” widgets wont work anymore. However all subscription forms will continue to work as usual. However, the graphics will be updated to reflect the RSSFWD.com brand.

4. The look and feel of your updates will change as a result of this migration. The existing Blogarithm email template will be replaced with the standard RSSFWD.com HTML email format, which will look different that the current emails you receive. The new footer will offer functionality around the ability to unsubscribe and to preview your subscriptions and set your preferences.

5. You can opt-out / unsubscribe entirely if you choose from the Blogarithm service prior to the migration, or after if you choose to. You can opt out of your communications by simply emailing the words “opt out” to optout@rssfwd.com

6. The Blogarithm service as it exists today will stop on May 20. From that point RSSFWD.com will be the platform powering all of your RSS to email subscriptions.

We appreciate your assistance, patience and understanding as we go through this transition. We are committed to brining you a comprehensive RSS to email solution for both publishers and consumers of content. With that the RSSFWD, is being built out with an enhanced feature set to give you more control over the content you subscribe to. In addition, we will be releasing some new publisher features and an API as well for easy blog / site integration. We will of course keep you updated when the new version is released.

Thanks again for using Blogarithm / RSSFWD! If you have any questions, comments or concerns, or have any issues with the migration of your subscriptions, please fee free to contact us at support@rssfwd.com and we will get back to you. Please note, we have well over 100k users and a small staff dedicated to support so it may take us a day or two to get back with you.

Best regards,

The RSSFWD / Blogarithm team
http://www.rssfwd.com

Again, we apologize for being slight on the blog postings. We will try to get active once again. Also, we ask for your patience with responses to support emails, with the two services combined now we have well over 65,000 users. It can take a few days to get a response to your support email, we thank you for your understanding!

Thanks again for using our service. We will post our development pipeline for RSSFWD to let you know what is coming over the next few months. Many new features for both consumers and publishers will be coming, as well as a premium version as a direct result of your feedback and requests, so stay tuned!

Thanks again!

New Feature:Email Digests

I’d resisted for a long time to release a feature like this. Reading feeds that have frequent daily updates, have always been dealt with by using the “Cluster” feature in RssFwd. And that has worked just fine up until now.

The fact is, is that there are many non-Gmail users fo RssFwd, and they need a different solution.

I’ve modified the subscription options form to look like the above image. You will find that the “Clustered” checkbox is now gone. This has been replaced with a new drop down selection for you to choose between “Normal” and “Clustered.”

In addition, I’ve sneaked in a few more options last week:

“Digest” for morning, afternoon, evening or night. What this means is that you can choose when you would like to receive your email. If you subscribe to CNN & Slashdot in the evening digest, you will get 1 email containing all the updates from both feeds for the day.

And in case you’re wondering, it will be in your timezone. If you choose “every evening“, it is your evening. Not mine. Not Greenwich Mean Time. And you don’t have to live in the US. This detail a big deal for me. Hopefully you’ll find it useful as well.

Welcome to RssFwd!

Thanks for stopping by. We have decided to set up an “official” RssFwd.com blog thats focused solely on this service. We have a lot of updates and positive changes coming up in the near future and we want to make sure you know about them!

As many of you may know RssFwd was acquired by my company, Blue Sky Factory, Inc, earlier this year. I have to say, it has been a true pleasure working with Choon Keat, and we are excited that he remains passionate about RssFwd and continues on with us as the prime developer.

We would love to hear from you, our users. Tell us what you like, what you don’t like, and what we can do to better improve our service. RssFwd remains a simple, yet effective way to have RSS based content delivered right to your inbox.

We also love to hear about the unique and interesting ways people are using the service. If you haven’t seen some of the latest press, check out these two articles on how folks are using the service to get RSS updates to their mobile phones:

– Lifehacker – Get feed updates via text message – July 12th by Gina Trapani
– TUAW – Receive RSS feeds as SMS messages – July 13th by Erica Sadun

We look forward to hearing from you, and stay tuned for more updates and improvements to the service!