FreeMyFeed

On July 31st, after having been live for 3.5 months, we hit 1 million feeds served. Congratulations to the FreeMyFeed team and many thanks to all of our users for making this possible.

We are proud to announce the release of version 1.1 of FreeMyFeed. We are really excited about the enhancements and new features we have added to the site and hope that you will be too.

Below are a list of features that made it into this release:

Enhancements/New Features:

• Feed Auto Discovery - When the URL that is given does not validate as a feed, a feed discovery will be launced locating a feed based on points 1-6 of the Ultra-Liberal RSS Locator.
• Subscription Button Generator - Like the Subscribe using [site here] buttons such as the Google Reader button or Bloglines button, this will generate code that you can place on your site to give readers and easy way to subscribe to your authenticated feed. When they click on the button they will be taken to FreeMyFeed where the URL will already be filled in. The user then only needs to enter a username and password.
• Feed Error Reporting - Reports errors such as 404 not found and 403 authorization required by creating a feed item and returning that during the request so that you see it in your feed reader. Included in the error report are instructions on resolving the error.
• Frequently Asked Questions - Due to popular demand I have created a FAQ with none other than…you guessed it…frequently asked questions.
• HTTPS/SSL - We have added a valid SSL certificate to FreeMyFeed. You can now access all parts of the site via HTTPS/SSL. If you access the site via HTTPS when freeing your feed your alternate URL will use HTTPS. If you use HTTP your alternate URL will use HTTP. You can at any time decide to use one or the other simply be changing http:// to https:// and vice versa.
• Better Feed Validation - Feeds are now validated using a popular feed parser, rather than simple regular expression matches.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed problem where a feed would not be found/returned with Live Journal feeds with a feed logo/image.

Without further adieu…FreeMyFeed 1.1.

We have successfully migrated FreeMyFeed to a new dedicated server. Some of you may have experienced some downtime during the migration but all functionality has been restored.

Now that we have moved to a new server version 1.1 will be released soon. Before the release, a list of the new features that made it into the application will be posted here.

Keep an eye out!

We have been working hard on the next version of FreeMyFeed. We haven’t decided on the version number this will land on due to the large number of new features. Within the next several weeks the new version will be pushed into production.

A small list of new features:

• Feed validation using SimplePie to provide more accurate validation and mime type detection.
• Feed auto location for finding a feed when the parent URL was provided and not the actual feed URL.
• Error reporting via the feed so that you will be notified in your feed reader if there is a problem with your feed.
• Subscription URL to recommend that people use FreeMyFeed to subscribe to your protected feed.

In addition to the features listed above an FAQ is slated for the next release.

Since officially releasing FreeMyFeed on April 14th the service has really begun to take off with the help of http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/ and Lifehacker.

Since all of the publicity beginning on April 17th from the aforementioned sites as well as many others, FreeMyFeed has been used to free over 800 feeds and has served up these feeds over 7000 times in under 4 days.

I am proud to announce that the official launch time of Free My Feed is today at 15:00 GMT.

Enjoy the service and pass it on to everyone you can think of.

Free My Feed is coming soon.

What is Free My Feed you may ask. Free My Feed is a web service designed to give you the capability of subscribing to authenticated feeds in a web based feed reader such as Google Reader or Bloglines.

Until now most if not all web based feed readers could not offer their users the ability to subscribe to feeds that required username/password authentication. This was left to the application based feed readers. Using Free My Feed a user can enter a RSS URL, username and password and be given an alternate URL that they can use in a web based feed reader, or an application based feed reader, that will enable them to subscribe to the feed without having to enter their username or password.

‘Subscribe to’ buttons have been added to make it easy when adding this new URL to your favorite feed reader such as Google Reader, Bloglines, My Yahoo!, and many more.

Free My Feed is at the moment unofficially live and can be found at http://freemyfeed.com/

The official launch date will be posted soon.