June 2006 Summary

It's been a while since I posted a monthly state o' the 'Blitz, so I'm going to take advantage of today's July 4th holiday to briefly catch up.

In previous updates I've started with the circulation numbers. Not to put too fine a point on it, the numbers I was using before were misleading. In upgrading the database in June we had to revisit every query we were using, and it turns out that the circulation metric we publish on the feedblitz.com home page was including both unsubscribed readers and paused feeds. It's not really a fair indication of the business, so as of today these metrics have been fixed.

The home page now reports active circulation and active feeds - i.e. the number of feeds we poll that could cause an email to be sent, and the number of individual items that could potentially be sent (that's the circulation). So it's kinda tough to do the trend analysis I usually do, so instead we'll be looking next month at the change from today's corrected total, which is an active circulation of 647,926. Meanwhile, the analytics tell us that, despite the database upgrade, hassles, feedblitz.com had 205,634 visits in June and 729,583 page views.

Since my last update (made in March looking at February; yes - it's been that long), we've added the following new features and capabilities:

• Real-time interactive analytics and reporting for:
• Open tracking.
• Click-through tracking.
• Activity tracking.
• Subscription changes.
• OPML syndication.
• Weekly publishing schedules.
• Bulk subscriber management.
• Annual payment plans.
• The TypePad email newsletter widget.
• Autoresponders.
• Custom confirmation, unsubscribe and registration messages.
• Subscriber import for everyone.
• Table of contents for everyone.
• Newsflash broadcast emails.
• Subscriber signup verification question.

We also upgraded the database software (which was not a pleasant experience), migrated the database to a dedicated server, and added a new bulk mail server. The database has settled down well, and you may have noticed that your emails are arriving earlier than they used to - that's the result of the performance benefits that both the database upgrade and the new bulk server are bringing. We've gone from a single machine doing everything (web server, app server, database server, inbound and outbound mail servers) to a set of three.

The benefits? The nightly poll is now running approximately 3 times faster since we introduced the new servers, and there's more to come as we bring other elements of our scalable architecture online over the Summer. None of these additional improvements is as significant a change as the database engine, so further disruption ought to be minimal. But you can expect to see continual improvement in delivery times.

Finally, the big news for the company was, of course, our funding by Tom Evslin in late May. That gives us the ability - and you the confidence - that we're set and steady for the next stage in our growth. Now we're past the upgrade issues, there are a lot more features we'll be able to deliver that will consolidate our position as the Internet's #1 RSS to mail service.