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Well, that's Ironic ... inbound mail is back

Tuesday, December 18, 2007

In resolving a connectivity problem on Monday morning, it appears my hosting service managed to disable inbound mail access to our main inbound mail server. 24 hours and many, many phone calls later it's now, finally, back up and running - so if you mailed us yesterday and it bounced, sorry - please try again. Outbound email for subscribers was not affected and newsletters and broadcasts have been going out as per normal.

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Master Templates for Multiple Newsletter Formatting

Tuesday, December 11, 2007

If you publish multiple newsletters, it's often desirable to have consistent branding applied to all of them, and their corresponding subscriber landing pages. To do that one at a time, however, can be tedious to manage if you have more than two or three newsletters running.

To simplify multi-newsletter branding, we've brought our Master Template concept into our core Newsletter Edition services (it used to be only available for publishers on our old "Pro Plus" plan, which is no longer available to new clients). Enabling master templates delivers consistent branding and graphic design to the emails we send on your behalf, and to the subscriber-facing pages, such as the subscription form, the activation instructions, the confirmation page and unsubscribe survey.

Not only does a master template simplify branding across multiple HTML email newsletters, it's also used when the multi-newsletter subscription form is displayed (without a master template the form is shown without any branding at all). Talking of which, we recently updated the HTML subscription form generator to give you a link to the multi-newsletter signup form as well as standard HTML form code. You can use the link version in places where forms don't work so well, such as email signatures or (for example) sites hosted at wordpress.com.

Enable master templates by visiting the Newsletter Center for the publication whose graphic design is to be the master, check the Master Template check box on, and save.

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FeedBlitz Email Ad Network Adds Banner & Image Ads

Monday, December 10, 2007

If a picture speaks a thousand words then this new addition to our newsletter ad network is good news. FeedBlitz now supports IAB Universal Ad Package banner ads. Pricing is similar to text ads, except that the CPM rate a banner ad is charged at depends on the number of text ads it displaces, so all banners start at $4 CPM except for the 468 pixel wide banner, which is $2 CPM (it only displaces two text ads).

Agencies, networks and direct buyers interested in a media kit should email me at our info@ address.

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November 2007 Monthly Update

Wednesday, December 05, 2007

Much of the changes we publicized in November were about the new ad service that we launched in October. The most important change for bloggers, I think, was the simplification of the process to place an ad to take readers directly to your subscription page. If you want to promote your blog to like minded readers, advertising with FeedBlitz and picking the right keywords or content channel is a great - and easy - way to attract attention and new subscribers. We also introduced a year-end bonus, and wondered about pricing arbitrage for blog reading on the Kindle.

Meanwhile, FeedBlitz also introduced new flexibility and simplicity to the subscription process (OK that was early December, so I'm getting a little flexible with the dates here). You've seen parts 1 and 2 so far; part 3 is being readied and you'll see that in a few days.

Important: Maintenance Downtime, Dec 17.

FeedBlitz will be offline on from midnight to 07:00 EST December 17 as our hosting provider is moving to a brand new data center. Once the systems come back up we'll play catch up on the mailings. Please plan accordingly.

And so to the numbers.
  • Circulation: 3,769,964 (up 14% on October)
  • feedblitz.com page views: 1,951,498 (down just over 2% - I blame Thanksgiving)
  • feedblitz.com unique visitors: 783.079 (down <>
  • Total messages sent: 37,056,996 (up 16% )
  • Average messages / day: 1,235,233
  • Peak daily messages: 1,646,022 (Nov 15)

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Simply Smarter Subscriptions, Part 2

Tuesday, December 04, 2007

Last week, I talked about an upgrade to the HTML newsletter subscription form that allows:
  • Publishers to offer subscriptions to all their publications from a single signup;
  • Users to subscribe in a popup window to keep them on the publisher's site;
  • Multi-newsletter forms to offer IM and social media subscription options as well as email.

With this post, FeedBlitz introduces a much-improved version of the Subscription Center for subscribers who are subscribing to more than one publication. Now the Subscription Center main page looks something like this:


Now when a subscriber goes to the subscription center they see all their current subscriptions in one place - and can start and stop them from that one screen, without having to click through to anywhere else.

  • Want to stop several subscriptions? Simply un-check them from the list and update.
  • Want to bring some back? Click the "All available" button and all your subscriptions - active or unsubscribed - will appear. Check the ones you want to bring back, update, done.

Both processes are much simpler and much more intuitive to use than before (a login is still required, however, to access your subscriptions). Subscribers may still click the drop down box in the Subscription Center to work with a single subscription in more detail, of course, but this change makes the most common tasks - unsubscribing and resubscribing from the web site - much simpler and quicker to access.

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Denial of Service Attack - Collateral Damage?

Earlier this morning FeedBlitz web sites were effectively offline courtesy of an apparent distributed denial of service attack that overloaded our web servers. As of now, we've deployed more web servers and taken other mitigation steps to bring the WWW service back online. All functionality should now be readily accessible again.

It's my assumption, looking at the logs, that FeedBlitz itself was not the direct target of the attack - we're a service provider, after all, with no particular axe to grind. Rather, a set of bots based in Russia were attacking a client's blog that linked back to us, and they were simply blindly downloading all the links on that particular site. The blog is a security blog discussing, among other things, malware, personal freedoms and its oppressions, things like that. I guess a group of oppressors or crooks didn't like it. FeedBlitz became, in effect, collateral damage as they tried beating up that site.

As a result of the extra load, mailings will probably take longer than usual to get out as the mail servers get a chance to catch up.

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