Paging Your Subscribers! Improvements for large circulation blogs

A new feature added this week is the ability to page through your subscriber lists using VCR-like controls. For users of large lists (several thousand names) this makes a large difference - response times of a few seconds instead of minutes or (worse yet) timing out. Coupled with some performance improvements made last week this has made a tremendous difference in managing large circulations. For example, it was possible for me to see the most recent confirmed subscribers to FeedBlitz - the last page of more than 350 - in about eight seconds. It was simply impossible before. Go to http://www.feedblitz.com/f/f.fbz?Subscribers to see it in action.

The page size is currently fixed at 250, so for most users there is no difference. The new controls sit above the subscriber table - you can't miss them. It's possible to list all your subscribers if you like by clicking "All" (but then it may take much longer for your browser to display them all, if at all). You can go back to paging by clicking any of the page control buttons (first, next, back, last).

In parallel, the first OPML features are available - subscriptions, syndications and subscribers may now be exported in text or OPML. The export facilities export ALL subscribers, even if you're looking at one of many pages. So you can always download them all from the very first page, even for long lists. They're your subscribers, and this fulfills a pledge made earlier to give you unfettered access to them. OPML is still not a well-defined standard, with implementations adopting various strategies to ambiguities in the spec, so if you have any OPML issues let us know and we'll work it out.

So if OPML export is there, what next? Well, let's say I'm in the market for a few good betas who might want to test an import facility to ease migration from systems other than bloglet. Volunteers please email me at the info@ address.