|
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
Just a quick heads up about minor changes today that are going to go a long way to improving the FeedBlitz user experience and email deliverability.
No more .exe file extensions in emails. You can now access FeedBlitz's features at www.feedblitz.com/f/ - not only is it shorter than the previous .exe URL (which still works, by the way), but it doesn't look like a virus to particularly dim anti-virus mail monitors and / or junk mail filters. Bottom line: more of the emails will get through. New HTML subscription forms will use this version; existing subscriptions forms will still work as always. No action is required by any publisher or subscriber.
No more download manager problems. Better yet, since some download managers think that an exe is always to be downloaded, despite what the FeedBlitz web server tells them, the new shorter URL scheme removes download manager aggravations for users of this class of utility.
Dashboard fixes. Under some circumstances, errors in feeds weren't bubbling up to the dashboard level. This has been fixed. All feeds in the dashboard properly reflect the underlying deliverability status.
Preview error reporting enhancements. If your feed could not be fetched and you tried to preview it all you saw was the orange FeedBlitz headers and nothing else. This has been changed so that a large friendly (-ish) error message appears, which also includes the underlying error text from the problem (usually a timeout or a DNS issue). The more technically inclined users will find this information helpful and the whole interaction is considerably less user-hostile.
Subscriber count fixes. A rare problem that caused circulation to be significantly under-reported in some larger feeds has been resolved.
Beta fixes. Some "Pro" beta feeds were not going out; they will now.
No more .exe file extensions in emails. You can now access FeedBlitz's features at www.feedblitz.com/f/ - not only is it shorter than the previous .exe URL (which still works, by the way), but it doesn't look like a virus to particularly dim anti-virus mail monitors and / or junk mail filters. Bottom line: more of the emails will get through. New HTML subscription forms will use this version; existing subscriptions forms will still work as always. No action is required by any publisher or subscriber.
No more download manager problems. Better yet, since some download managers think that an exe is always to be downloaded, despite what the FeedBlitz web server tells them, the new shorter URL scheme removes download manager aggravations for users of this class of utility.
Dashboard fixes. Under some circumstances, errors in feeds weren't bubbling up to the dashboard level. This has been fixed. All feeds in the dashboard properly reflect the underlying deliverability status.
Preview error reporting enhancements. If your feed could not be fetched and you tried to preview it all you saw was the orange FeedBlitz headers and nothing else. This has been changed so that a large friendly (-ish) error message appears, which also includes the underlying error text from the problem (usually a timeout or a DNS issue). The more technically inclined users will find this information helpful and the whole interaction is considerably less user-hostile.
Subscriber count fixes. A rare problem that caused circulation to be significantly under-reported in some larger feeds has been resolved.
Beta fixes. Some "Pro" beta feeds were not going out; they will now.
|
|
posted at 9:44 PM
2 Comments:
Excellent thought.
Can you extend this change to simplified sign-up as well.
http://feedblitz.blogspot.com/2005/10/simplified-subscriber-sign-up-part-ii.html
Hi Amit:
The exe-less version applies to any and all FeedBlitz functionality, inlcuding the subscription forms and sign up links. If you go to the HTML code generation section (from "My Feeds" in the "My FeedBlitz" menu) you will see that it now uses the shorter notation.
Thanks!
Phil
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.
<< Home