Help Me, Feedburner, You’re My Only Hope

One of the first blog posts I wrote here was about how much I love Feedburner. Feedburner is so good at handling all the RSS feeds at my college, and I don’t have to worry about it.

One of Feedburner’s best features is it’s email subscriptions services. It handles user subscriptions, unsubscribe requests and lets you customize the look of the emails that get sent out. Basically, it’s the perfect RSS to Email platform. Set it and forget it. Each day, it dutifully sends out an email with my RSS headlines to on and off-campus users. It’s so great I want to use it send our intranet headlines to everyone on my campus. I’ve got the OK from administration and I want to get this project done.

So I started researching if Feedburner would let me import email addresses for my campus users. For a bit of time, Feedburner would allow you send a file to them and they would import email addresses for you. It’s a bit more work then just letting people do it themselves, but I can imagine that would lead to a spam avalanche for Feedburner. So, they stopped accepting email list imports.

During that time, they got acquired by Google. I’m sure they enjoyed a nice payday and the reliability of Google’s architecture, but the downside is that innovation and development on new features has pretty much dried up, similar to Google’s many other acquisitions (Grand Central, DodgeBall, Jaiku, etc.) The email list import is the biggest request by users on the support forums, and the answer seems to vary between “soon” to “sometime this month” to “never.”

I want to use Feedburner to send my emails. I’ve tried other services like Feedblitz and the emails lack the elegance of Feedburner. No offense, FeedBlitz, but setting up an account in your system was a hassle and the customization options were confusing. Feedburner is 10x more simple. Look at these emails and tell me which one looks more elegant and easier to read and understand.

Feedburner:

An email from Feedburner.

FeedBlitz:

An email from Feedblitz

Help me, Feedburner. Please, I beg you, let me import my users into your system. I will pay you for this functionality. I don’t have the time to spend trying to figure out how to make FeedBlitz look presentable. If anyone at Feedburner reads this, please email me.

Does anyone else out there have suggestions of services to check out, seeing as how FB will probably not get back to me? Thank you in advance.

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August 25, 2008 | Filed Under Feedburner, Google, RSS, Web App | 3 Comments

Where The Magic Happens: Part 4

Over the last few months, I’ve asked some higher ed web folks to show off where they work their magic. This time, it’s my turn. Here’s my office in Bentley Hall, built in the 1820’s and the first building on our campus. It’s neat to think about all the people over almost 200 years who have lived, learned and worked in this space. I’ve stitched together a few photos, but sadly you’re missing the wall with the corkboard and the retired numbers of students (and some part-timers) who have done awesome work for us over the years. You also can’t see my “Top Walker” plaque - I was the top money-raiser for the Meadville area March of Dimes in 2007.

I’ve added a few notes to the Flickr page.