Thumbnails and media files

Its been a while since the last post, so I thought I'd let you know about a couple of new features that are now out of testing, and available for all users.


Thumbnails
If a feed presents thumbnails (via the Media RSS extension, for the curious), then these will be displayed to the right of the subject line.

Media files
Also known as media content, enclosures, attachments, and probably some other names too.  These files will be displayed in a section at the bottom of the item block.

Both these features are enabled by default for all users, and can be controlled through your Account Settings page.

Blogtrottr goes twittering

Blogtrottr is now on twitter!  You can find us at http://www.twitter.com/blogtrottr

You can also now add social media links to your emailed updates, allowing you to easily share your favourite news and blog posts.

You'll find these options in your Account Settings page.  If you've not got an account yet, then sign up!

Update: To clarify, enabling these options will add a row of icons to the bottom of your emails, much like these:

Upgrades

On Saturday 16th July, we'll be migrating all subscriptions over to our new beta platform.

Blogtrottr will be unavailable from 09:00 UTC for approximately 2 hours that day whilst we make these changes. 

What will the differences be?
The service will be faster, more scalable, easier to manage, and provide more features.

Are you going to start charging?
The unrestricted basic service will always be available for free.  In the future we plan to introduce a low cost premium subscription option to give access to more advanced features, such as feed filtering and advanced mail formatting.  Whilst in the beta testing period, all features will be provided to everyone at no cost.

Restricted schedules
Unfortunately, some services (currently Yahoo Pipes and Twitter) limit the frequency with which we can poll them for change, which means that we can't offer the frequency of updates that we'd like to.  When the subscriptions are migrated, all Yahoo Pipes and Twitter subscriptions will be changed to daily digests.

Slow updates

Update 10th July 07:47UTC: We're back at full capacity again now, and everything is flying along once again.

Some of you may have noticed that updates are a little slow in coming through today.  This is because one of our hosting providers is currently experiencing a large DDoS attack, which has taken out their network and with it one of our faster feed processing machines.

Everything is currently running on a backup server with a different provider, but it's being worked pretty hard at the moment and so emails will take longer than usual to come through until we get this sorted out.

We apologise for the inconvenience, and thank you for your patience at this time.

The beta service is completely unaffected by any of this, so if you want to get quick updates you can hop over to beta.blogtrottr.com, sign up for an account, and easily migrate your existing feeds over.

Blogtrottr beta

 It's been a while coming, but the next version of Blogtrottr is finally in beta!

What's new?
- Complete platform rewrite, for increased performance and scalability
- User accounts, for easier subscription management
- Globally disable / enable emails for your account
- OPML import/export
- Feed filters: send/exclude items where title/body does/doesn't match a string
- Shorter URLs for those mobile users
- Customizable email subjects
- Digests - 2/4/6/8/12/24 hourly roll-ups
- Better feed auto-detection: user choice when multiple feeds are available for a given URL

with much more to come in the next few months.

http://beta.blogtrottr.com/signup/

Yahoo Pipes

We're currently being rate limited by Yahoo Pipes, which is resulting in long delays between updates on any pipes feeds. 

While awaiting a response from Yahoo support, we've backed down the poll time for these feeds to 8 hours, which hopefully should get things moving again, albeit far slower than we'd like.

Ah, PuSH it...

Good news everyone! Blogtrottr is now using PubSubHubbub.

This means much speedier updates than previously experienced, as rather than polling a feed every hour to look for updates, we are notified as soon as new content is posted. In a nutshell, as soon as new stuff appears on a PubSubHubbub enabled feed, you've got it.

PubSubHubbub is quickly gaining traction, and is already being used by Blogger, FeedBurner, FriendFeed, LiveJournal, WordPress and more, with plugins available for most other popular blogging software, so there's a good chance that some of your favorite feeds already support it.

Visit the PubSubHubub project page for more information.