Importing subscriptions from Google Reader

The venerable and long serving Google Reader will be closing it's doors later this year, however as Google allows you to export your existing subscriptions into an OPML file, you can easily import them into Blogtrottr.

Export your subscriptions from Google Reader

Click the 'Settings' gear icon in Google Reader, and choose 'Reader Settings'

Select the Import/Export tab, and click the Download your data through takeout link

Click the Create Archive button

And download the archive.

 

Open up the downloaded zip file, navigate into the Reader folder, and extract the subscriptions.xml file.  This is in a standard OPML format that can be imported into Blogtrottr.

Import your subscriptions into Blogtrottr

Log into your Blogtrottr account (if you've not got one yet, you can sign up here)

From the My Subscriptions page, click OPML import

 

Choose the subscriptions.xml file from earlier, and click Import, and you're done!

 

The end of Twitter RSS support

Unfortunately Twitter have deprecated RSS support, and it looks like it'll be gone for good on March 5th - meaning any Blogtrottr subscriptions to Twitter RSS feeds are likely to stop working completely at that time.


Being an RSS to email service, this somewhat removes Blogtrottr's ability to work with Twitter, so I'm afraid we have to suggest that you make alternative arrangements to get your Twitter updates via email in the future.


One of the most popular alternative services at the moment appears to be tweetymail - so you may want to head over there and check out their offerings.


My sincere apologies for any inconvenience caused, but as I'm sure you're appreciate, this one is rather out of our hands.

Using Blogtrottr with Dropbox

Here's a nice article on a-iKnowledge.com about using Blogtrottr with Dropbox for file change notifications in a shared environment.

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.