Behind the Scenes: Blogtrottr's Getting an Upgrade

I’m pleased to announce that a new version of the Blogtrottr website is in development and is now available as an open beta for any users who might like to get an early look.

This update mostly focuses on modernising the platform's foundations. While you might not see dramatic changes on the surface yet, there have been significant improvements under the hood that will pave the way for new features in the future.

The new version will move out of beta in the next couple of months, and you can find it at beta.blogtrottr.com

Easier subscription management with one-click unsubscribe

For many years, Blogtrottr has provided two means of managing feed subscriptions - following the unsubscribe link in an email, or by creating website account.

Now there’s a third way - Blogtrottr recently started sending one-click unsubscribe enabled emails, so if your email client is compatible (and most major ones like Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, and macOS are), you can unsubscribe from a feed instantly, without visiting our website.

 

Behind the scenes, we integrated with Sendamatic’s automatic one-click unsubscribe handling to implement this easily. If you need similar capabilities for your project, they come highly recommended.

Price Updates: Some good news

We have good news for our Blogtrottr users. In addition to Euros we now support payments in GBP and USD. We are also offering price plans in these currencies.

Most card providers add a foreign currency transaction fee, and from month to month the exchange rate fluctuates. Paying in your local currency will give you more certainty over the price you pay each month, as well as hopefully saving you a bit of money.

The various plans on offer are available at https://blogtrottr.com/pricing/

If you are an existing paid plan user and want to switch currencies get in touch with our support (support@blogtrottr.com) as changing currencies mid-plan isn’t currently possible through the website.

When our users make us smile

Who doesn’t love a bit of positive feedback? Blogtrottr started life because of our passion to provide a service that was missing in our lives, and we wanted to share it with other people. Blogtrottr has developed over the years to do more than providing your favourite blogs and news feeds into your inbox as and when you want it, but that is still core to what we do.

We had this message land in our inbox the other day, and it made us smile as we shared it around our virtual office. We are glad it is working as well as we hope and aim for. Thank you!

“This service has worked for me for years. Through my changing devices maybe five times, switching operating systems from Windows to Android, at least three ISPs, and a couple of dozen browsers... never skipped a beat, never had a blip of a problem.

So thank you.” - Emarell

Watching the Formula Pi Races

Avid readers of our blog will know that Blogtrottr are sponsoring this year's Formula Pi races; a test of wits and skill for coders of all ages from around the world.  For those of you not yet in the know, Formula Pi races involve racing identical self driving robots on a track, however all the robots are run off a Raspberry Pi which use the code sent in by the competitors.  The aim is to ensure your code gets the robot around the track quicker than any of the other robots on the track, a task much less straightforward than it sounds.

Since the test races we have seen great improvements in the races, although we are glad to see that there is still plenty of chaos to keep us entertained.  In the heats you can see how well all 16 competitors from around the world have done, the coding experience on the track ranges from a few hours experience to many years.  It is certainly worthwhile watching the highlights available on YouTube.

Race Two is already underway with full length videos currently available on Youtube, and Blogtrottr are continuing to sponsor and watch.

Find out about taking part in 2017 at http://www.formulapi.com/

Carnage on the Race Track!

Blogtrottr are proud to be sponsoring the Formula Pi races in 2016; a test of wits and skill for coders of all ages from around the world.  Formula Pi races involve putting identical self driving robots on a track, all run on a Raspberry Pi using different code which is sent in by each competitor.  When the lights turn green the aim is to ensure your code gets the robots around the track quicker than any of the other robots on the track, a task much less straightforward than it sounds.

The first test races for the Formula Pi winter race 2016 series are now underway, and they are keeping us tuned in.  In the first test session a false start, numerous crashes, pile ups, flips and the loss of a wheel on one of the robots helped highlight a few potential issues whilst also providing entertaining watching.  There will be things to improve on for when the races take place in November.

The next testing session was on Monday 24th October, no doubt providing more entertaining watching.  

Entries to the the final races themselves close at the end of the month, and Blogtrottr will be continuing to sponsor and watch.

Find out about taking part at http://www.formulapi.com/

Feeling buzzed up about innovative uses: how billing provider Chargebee use Blogtrottr

We are always passionate about what Blogtrottr does, and keen to hear from our users about the more novel ways they use our product.  When we heard from Chargebee, a SaaS billing provider (who incidentally are one of our suppliers as well as our customers) about how they have solved some of their own internal business issues by using Blogtrottr we were pretty excited.

Chargebee is able to use Blogtrottr in more than the traditional ways:  Of course they subscribe to a number of blogs to keep up to date on current security issues and possible vulnerabilities, and manage this via Blogtottr to ensure they miss nothing vital.  However in addition to this they have used Blogtrottr innovatively to solve issues, and are happy to let us share some of these solutions with you.  

Here is Balaji Jayaraman, CSO of Chargebee, with more details:

RSS Feed

Chargebee uses both internal and external monitoring for our service. For internal monitoring we use Amazon's cloud watch. Cloud watch monitors CPU, memory, disk and other application related custom metrics that we use. We had incidents where we thought cloud watch would do its job but it would have gone down and we wouldn’t know about it.

We started to use Blogtrottr to get cloud watch status as RSS feed so that our team will know that we have problems with cloud watch and we can closely monitor our production instances.

Email Updates

We needed to have all the updates Amazon does with respective softwares installed to its instances. For instance, for any critical update, we would get notified via emails in real-time. This way we get to know about OS updates or fixes immediately.

We have integrations with other service providers. Some have email subscriptions but some have only feeds. We use Blogtrottr to get their status updates via email.

Alerts & Monitoring

When we get payment failure alerts, we also get notified at the same time from Blogtrottr regarding payment gateways status. This makes it easy for the monitoring team to check payment gateway's status than spending time in analysing on Chargebee’s end.

You can see why we were excited to hear from them.  Chargebee have been innovative in the ways they have used Blogtrottr to utilise its potential.  We are really glad to be part of such an interesting solution, especially for such an fantastic company.

Want to share how you use Blogtrottr with the community? Get in touch by emailing phil@blogtrottr.com