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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Jott will now read you RSS feeds
I’ve written about Jott before as a possible killer app for higher ed web developers, and yesterday they announced a new addition to the service, which sounds really cool.
You can tell Jott the address of RSS feeds and when you call in, Jott will read you your feed headlines. How great is that - no matter where you are, you can call in and stay up to date with all your feeds and RSS subscriptions.
It will also read you the Tweets of people you follow in Twitter - that’s pretty clutch.
You can sign up for free at jott.com.
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Feedburner is your Friend
Let me preface this by saying I love Feedburner.
Since 2003, I’ve been publishing a ton of RSS feeds at the college where I work. Since 2005, I believe, I’ve been using Feedburner to help distrubute my RSS feeds. Here’s why.
First, Feedburner takes the load off you. If your feeds get popular at all, you’ll notice how often clients will poll your feed for updates. I was seeing clients updating every two minutes! By off-loading that to Feedburner, I don’t have to worry about the bandwidth. Here’s a quick graph showing the growth of just our news and events feed:
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