Twitter Improvements

For those of you using FeedBlitz and Twitter, we've made a few key changes to the way we handle Twitter - and it's become simpler to sign up and easier to manage once you do. As one of the first services to integrate Twitter into our capabilities, we now have a lot of experience to apply to this particular mashup.

For starters, where there used to be two different versions of Twitter on the subscription form, there's now just one, called simply "Twitter." This option sends tweets to you using the "direct message" functionality of Twitter, and does not update any followers you may have. So there's no risk of updating all your followers with all your subscriptions, which has been an issue for some subscribers in the past.

The option to update your followers has been temporarily hidden - it was (is) a tool to allow bloggers to automatically micro blog (or re-blog) their content to Twitter without having to fret about formatting etc. This option was confusing to subscribers, but since it's useful it will shortly be making an appearance (or perhaps a reappearance) in publishers' Newsletter Centers. The functionality will still work great for those currently using it; it's simply no longer on the subscription form.

Finally, unsubscribing from our Twitter options could be a challenge, especially for those who elected not to associate their Twitter IDs with an email address that they could later use to log in to FeedBlitz with. Problem solved! The support page now has links to FeedBlitz login forms that let you log in to FeedBlitz using your Twitter credentials instead of an email address, and from there gives you an automatically generated subscription center for all your updates that generate tweets. Once in, a couple of clicks lets you suspend or re-enable a Twitter subscription, making unsubscribing from your FeedBlitz generated Twitter updates a snap.

Tweet on!

Sep 24 - very slow today...

... but catching up. Don't send an on demand mailing for a post that should have gone out today as it will be sent autoamtically.

update - all done!

Early morning service interruptions 9/18

We had some infrastructure issues overnight that has delayed mailings and made the site unresponsive; it's now been fixed and mailings are going out as fast as we can push them.

FeedBlitz Publisher Survey

Just a quick FYI that we're running a one-time survey and profile update of FeedBlitz publishers. There's a simple form to complete to update basic biographical data (all covered by our privacy policy of course), along with the chance for you to tell us more about what you want to see added or changed in the service. The results are confidential and, once the form has been filled, it goes away to its happy place and won't bother you again.

New Feature: Newsletters from Protected Wordpress Blogs

Good news for wordpress.com users who want to offer email newsletter (and IM and Twitter) subscriptions to their protected blogs. FeedBlitz can now access the RSS feed for protected WordPress blogs, provided that you give FeedBlitz a valid user name and password, of course.

FeedBlitz has long supported what's called HTTP authentication for password-protected RSS feeds, and this works well for sites that use it (TypePad password protected blogs, for example, can be accessed this way). But this approach doesn't work on wordpress.com blogs that are private, since WordPress uses a web-based login page to protect both the blog and its RSS feed. Before, FeedBlitz could only send a message relating to the login page itself - not useful. Now, FeedBlitz can authenticate via the web too. So wordpress.com users can offer their content privately online, but still offer an email service to users who log in and want to subscribe and be notified when new articles are posted. If a subscriber clicks through and visits your blog, they will still have to log themselves in to access the protected content.

Worth re-emphasizing, of course, that once FeedBlitz sends the content it's no longer secure - it can be forwarded around, copied and pasted and more. If you have a secure site, set the privacy flag on in its newsletter settings at the Newsletter Center, and enable the new NOINDEX feature to keep the content that FeedBlitz can now access (again, only if you give it the right credentials) out of the search engines. You give FeedBlitz a user name and password to accesss your blog during Newsletter setup, or on the security screen of the Newsletter Settings link in the Newsletter Center. If you're a WordPress user and already gave FeedBlitz a user name then you don't need to do anything - the feature's automatic.

Meanwhile, some readers will be wanting to know whether this means we can support Blogger's "Invitation Only" blogs. Sadly not, but not because of the login issue. Rather, taking a blog private on Blogger stops the RSS feed from being generated at all, so even after logging in there's nothing there for FeedBlitz to turn into a useful subscription update (oh, it sure looks like there's an RSS feed there, but accessing it gives the message "User does not have permission to read this blog" even when you're logged in and plainly do have permission. Bummer).

This has been tested for WordPress.com sites; it will probably work on self-hosted WordPress sites too, provided that there aren't any plugins messing around too greatly with the login page. If it fails to work let us know at the support address and we'll figure it out for you.

Aug 15 Issues - updated

We seem to have a database problem holding things up; we're investigating.

Update: Everything was back on an even keel by 9:45 am eastern this morning; the web site is functioning normally and outstanding mail seliveries are being caught up pronto.

NOINDEX

One of the features I personally like about FeedBlitz is the automatic creation of an online preview of your newsletter. It show subscribers what a mail from you will look like, and so encourages subscriptions because now they can be confident that it's content they're going to like. There's even a call to subscribe right at the top. The preview takes into account all your newsletter settings, so if you only show the first 350 characters (say) from each post in your mail, then the online preview also only has the first 350 characters.

Now, if you the publisher has the online preview link on your site - and many (but not all) do - then the search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN et al.) will follow the link to the preview, index it and add it to their databases. This is what a search engine does and it's all automatic. Usually this is fine and desired.

But. An unintended consequence of this may be that your online preview appears before your own site in search engine results pages for terms you care about. You may not care about that (you might even think that that's good, I don't know), but if you don't want that to happen we've got a brand new capability to help you change that and restore the order you want to the relevant search engine results.

FeedBlitz will now add the relevant code to the preview to tell robots not to index your online preview if you check on the "NOINDEX" option in the second page of the Newsletter Settings screens. Once done, the next time a search engine happens by, it will see the tag and not add the page to its database (and it should, if well-behaved, remove any existing index also). So the FeedBlitz previews will disappear from search engines for newsletters with the option set on, ensuring that your FeedBlitz newsletter preview doesn't get in the way of your site. Since FeedBlitz doesn't control when search engines revisit links it may be a while (A few days or possibly weeks worst case) for the change to kick in, but kick in it eventually will if you change the option.

To set the NOINDEX option:

1) Go to the Newsletter Center for the site in question
2) Click "Newsletter Settings"
3) Click "Next"
4) Enable the "NOINDEX" check box
5) Click "Done" to save.

When you refresh the preview the robots "NOINDEX" metatag will be present on the page, ready to welcome the next visit from your favorite search engine's update robot.

Join the FeedBlitz LinkedIn Publisher Group

I've personally been a little neglectful of my LinkedIn network recently, something I redressed with a vengeance over the weekend. And now I've set up a group for FeedBlitz publishers at LinkedIn, so you can all network together and expand your personal networks by dint of having FeedBlitz in common.

So, if you're a FeedBlitz publisher and you'd like to join our LinkedIn group, follow this link.

Talking of LinkedIn, a fabulous way to keep in touch with your LinkedIn network activity is to use FeedBlitz to mail you a daily update! This works for anyone, regardless of whether you're a FeedBlitz publisher or not:

1) Log in to LinkedIn.
2) In the left hand menu bar, click "Home" if you're not already there.
3) Click the iddy biddy orange RSS icon to the right of "Network Updates."

1) Go directly to http://www.linkedin.com/rssAdmin?display
2) Enable the feed for network updates if currently disabled.
3) Copy the RSS link.
4) Paste the RSS link into the form at the bottom of http://www.feedblitz.com/ and continue with the standard dual opt in subscription process.

You'll get a daily update of all your network activity directly to your mailbox, complete with table of contents and the usual FeedBlitz yummy goodness.

Custom Domain FAQs

We've had some good clarifications, questions and concerns raised over the new custom domain name feature we've added; this FAQ addresses, well, the most frequent ones.

Q: Isn't it true that custom domains aren't really domains?

A: Well, yes, technically speaking, "custom domains" are actually subdomains of feedblitz.com, that's true. Our custom domains are like having a dedicated URL for your newsletter at FeedBlitz. They're just the same as having a blog "XYZ" at xyz.blogger.com or xyz.wordpress.com or xyz.typepad.com - all these XYZ's are subdomains of the relevant site (and, dollars to doughnuts, all these hypothetical sites will be run by different people writing about XYZ, whose names are XYZ, or who think that "XYZ" is just a darned cool name for a blog - and the non-uniqueness of "XYZ" is very important, so bear it in mind as you read on).

Q: Do I have to buy the domains you reserved for me?

A: No; we're simply giving you the right of first refusal. There's no obligation; your services will continue on as they do now. If you don't want anything we reserved for you, don't buy it. There can only be one xyz.feedblitz.com, however.

Q: Can I buy any domain?

A: Yes, as long as its available and it isn't being used to spam or abuse others. The fee is $9.99 per domain per year, or about 84c a month, or just under thruppence a day.

You can use the ones we reserved for you, others that are suggested at www.feedblitz.com/f?pl_domains but not reserved, or define your own in the slots provided.

Q: So, in theory, Time Magazine could buy newsweek.feedblitz.com?

A: You mean, just as they could - in theory - register newsweek.blogspot.com or newsweek.typepad.com or newsweek.wordpress.com or newsweek.biz (etc. etc. - you get the idea), if those names were available? Yes, in theory. But in practice they don't, of course, and even if they did what they can't do is use any of these - from FeedBlitz or any other service - to infringe Newsweek's intellectual property. If they did, then the domains would be removed ASAP by the provider once the good folks over at Newsweek got wind of it.

FeedBlitz will treat spamming on custom domains the same way we do those trying to abuse our mail servers: swiftly and with prejudice.

Q: But those blogging services have been / are being abused by spammers. Why are FeedBlitz custom domains going to be different?

Unlike the free blogging services, FeedBlitz requires a credit card to acquire the domain. You have to buy these things. It's therefore much more time-consuming to abuse FeedBlitz the way, say, Blogger is often prone to. It's a lot more expensive to do so as well and, because of the credit card requirement, the audit trail is deeper and subject to validation. TypePad is rarely abused by spammers for just this reason - you have to pay them.

Plus, if there is abuse, we'll kill the domain and block the user without hesitation.

Q: What happens if I don't buy a custom domain? Will FeedBlitz "sell" it and my good name to anyone?

A: If your reservation expires then it's removed from the database (you may see it suggested again; FeedBlitz recalculates suggested domains for you every time you visit the domain management page, but they're never stored unless you reserve or buy them).

We are not maintaining a "registry" of subdomains for resale (in fact, anyone discovered reserving domains for the purpose of reselling them to their "rightful" owners will be treated as a spammer - swiftly and with prejudice). We're not going to run out and say "xyz.feedblitz.com wasn't picked up - who wants it?" It's not what we do. Subdomains are strictly a usability and brand reinforcement feature for publishers which we think has value and is worth $9.99 a year.

That said, if someone else wants "xyz.feedblitz.com" and they're not infringing your intellectual property (i.e. copyrights, trademarks etc.) or otherwise libelling you, then they can have it - there's no reason not to. For example, your blog may be "xyz.blogger.com" but there will be others named similarly at other services (e.g. our hypothetical "xyz.wordpress.com" and "xyz.typepad.com") ; there may well also be offline "brick and mortar" businesses too - perhaps there's a bistro called "XYZ" just around the corner from you. They could all buy and legitimately use "xyz.feedblitz.com" if they wanted to. If you recall the first answer, "XYZ" is probably not unique to your site. Abuse will not be tolerated; but similarly we will not discourage legal, reasonable use either.

Q: How may subdomains can I buy?

A: There are no limits, but (again) we won't permit abuse of the facility. That said, there can only be one "xyz.feedblitz.com" - which is why we're giving current publishers first refusal now.

Q: Can I have fourth level and higher domains?

A: Sure. You could define "sales.xyz.feedblitz.com" and "marketing.xyz.feedblitz.com" for example, and associate different newsletters or landing pages with each one.

Q: Can I buy using PayPal?

A: Not at the moment, no, unless you have the PayPal debit card, which I think will work.

New Feature: Private Label Custom Domains

Last week I gave our premium publishers a few days' head start on a new capability to be announced this week. It being next week now, time to take the wraps off Private Label Custom Domains.

Custom domains are fully functional micro-sites from FeedBlitz that make life simpler for your subscribers by simplifying access to your newsletters and associated functionality online, and reinforce your branding via the domain itself and your custom template.

Incoming!

And a quick heads up here - if you haven't already heard from me about this, you will. Reason is that we've reserved domains for all our existing publishers, but these reservations all expire on August 10th. It's only fair and just that everyone has the chance to lock in their own brand names before they expire (and are available to all and sundry), even if they're not subscribing to this blog.

Simplify Access for your Subscribers

OK, so what do custom domains do? Well, they're URLs (here's one that's live right now: http://weathersnob.feedblitz.com/) that you define that map to your brand, site, publication and more. They can be set up with a variety of default actions, such as:

• Offering a subscription form for a specific publication;
• Displaying an online preview for a publication with a link to subscribe;
• A subscription form for all your online publications;
• Online subscriber preference centers for your publications.

By simply having a single domain that sets subscribers on the path to subscribing to your content using an easily remembered, consistently branded web address, you build on the trust they have in you as well as making signing up simpler. These custom domains are also great to include in email or IM signatures, for example, or to have added to your business cards.

Intelligent Design

All the pages on your custom domain are constructed and maintained for you by FeedBlitz automatically, saving you thousands over the equivalent cost for a web site developer to add similar functionality to an existing site.

Better yet, FeedBlitz will figure out the domains that fit best for you - and their default actions - automatically. They can be viewed at any time at www.feedblitz.com/f?pl_domains. Don't like what we picked? That's OK! You can define your own instead.

Secure Your Brand

One other benefit of a FeedBlitz custom domain is that it's yours: nobody else can take it while your account is in good standing and you're not violating any third party's copyright. You can protect your good name as well as making life simpler for your subscribers by reserving the newsletter domain that matches your brand, name or company.

If you're an advanced user, you can also modify your DNS to map a FeedBlitz custom domain to a subdomain on your own site via a CNAME record.

Just $9.99 per domain per year

FeedBlitz domains are available to any FeedBlitz account holder (not just premium publishers) for just $9.99 per domain per year. For well under a buck a month per domain you get branded pages, simplified subscriber access and brand security.

Go to the private label domains page now to see the reservations we've made on your behalf, and activate the ones you want before they expire or are taken by someone else. At the very least, go grab the one that maps most closely to your blog's name.

Managing Private Label Domains

As well as using the links above, you can always get to your custom domain page visa your Newsletter Center using the custom domain link or the "www" icon which has been there since last week.

So that's it for now. Those reservations will last until 11:59pm eastern on August 10th, which is fast approaching. Don't procrastinate! Get going!

UPDATE: FAQs on the new custom domains feature are now available.

July 2008 Monthly Update

My, it's been a long time since I've written a monthly update. Yikes! So time to catch up and kick things back into gear here.

In the last six months (yes, it really has been that long), FeedBlitz circulation has grown by nearly a million subscribers, or about 20%. That's actually a little less on a month by month basis than least year (on average), but that metric doesn't tell the whole story.

What has changed significantly over the last 6 months is the volume of messages FeedBlitz sends. back in October last year, FeedBlitz sent 32 million messages. In January, that figure had risen to just under 42 million messages. Last month, July, FeedBlitz sent 65.4 million messages, up over 50% in the last six months; in other words publishers are using FeedBlitz much more than before.

And so a lot of what we've been doing here is working on scalability - the ability to have our technology handle that kind of growth without going belly up. This work is what's taken the bulk of the time over the last six months, and what has kept me off air, as it were, for much of that time. Improving scalability has not been without its challenges - it's one of the toughest things to do in a 7x24 service when one gets to a certain size - and we've had moments where various elements of the infrastructure have shown signs of strain. I'm happy with the overall progress that's been made so far, although we're always looking for ways to improve further.

Not that we've been totally stuck down in the bit mines, mind you. Thanks to generous publishers in the FeedBlitz network, we now have translations on the principal subscriber pages in Portuguese, Spanish, French, Italian and Dutch. We've added MSN and Yahoo to the instant messaging options available to all. New capabilities to the template editor. And more to come later this week.

Finally, what with being so busy and all, I've been neglecting the stats update at the feedblitz.com home page. So that's changed too. There's the familiar circulation number, the newsletters number (which is more conservatively calculated than before, excluding active newsletters that don't have any current active subscribers), and a new metric: the number of active publishers. Currently standing at over 63,000, this small army of publishers - corporate marketers, media companies, bloggers and more - use FeedBlitz to automate, customize and manage their online email newsletter marketing, with nearly 100 subscribers each.

So now all I have to do is tell everyone else what this is all about.

But not now. Stay tuned...

Pre-Announcement Opportunity for Premium Publishers

Well, it's been a little quiet around here of late, but rest assured we've been working hard here at FeedBlitz Central - to the point where we're going to announce some interesting new capabilities starting next week.

By way of thanking those publishers who have upgraded to our paid services, I'm giving them a head start on using these features, starting today. I'll be writing directly to all our premium publishers shortly with more information on our new service and how to get in ahead of the curve.

If you like mysteries and can't wait for next week, I'll also say that the new capability is visible in the FeedBlitz UI right now. You'll just have to hunt for it...

Meanwhile, premium publishers should keep a beady eye on their inboxes for a missive from Yours Truly, and I'll be more active on the blog starting tomorrow with a monthly update.

May 29 - essential maintenance COMPLETE

Can't be avoided, folks, we'll be back up and at 'em ASAP.

Update: Catching up now...

May 8 - Delays being caught up this morning

The engine is a few hours behind but catching up quickly!

Zero Chicklets

... panic not, folks, there was just a problem with the chicklet generator yesterday afternoon. Your subs are fine and the chicklet images are being regenerated now to show the correct number.

Meh.

Well, "the next nice problem to have" (see the end of my prior post) didn't take too long to show up, did it? I'm sure there's a lesson here about Fate, Temptation, and not mixing the two together.

So, having made the web site a whole bunch spiffier it took, what, a little over a couple of days for the back end poller to get stuck in the weeds. The root cause was the queries we use to build the jobs on each server that divvy up the bulk mailings, slowing down due to the ever growing number of subscribers and subscriptions we're managing. In the end the slow down was enough to create a kind of "traffic jam" in the DB which, in turn, pretty much slowed everything else down too. A positive feedback effect which only served to amplify the problem. So, not a failure of the improvements we made last week; rather a timely reminder that there are many components in an application stack and that a problem in any one of them affects performance as a whole.

Briefly, then, we've modified our data architecture to slim down one of the three main queries used in each batch. So far so good, in that FeedBlitz caught up with the backlog relatively quickly this evening (Wednesday); we'll see how things perform under the stress of an overnight run. There's still more to be done on this front, but this ought to go a long way to bringing bulk mail performance (and all the other interactions that depend on a sprightly database) back to where they used to be. Thanks for your patience on this one...

Faster, FeedBlitz, Faster!

You ever heard the phrase "that's a nice problem to have"? It's the kind of problem like having too much money (I've yet to experience this one :-) ), or - for an Internet service - so much traffic that your site is brought to its knees. Congratulations on being successful, and by the way your site is down.

A nice problem is still, well, a problem.

So last week we weren't crushed, but FeedBlitz has been much busier than usual, and performance has been, at times (let's be charitable), sluggish. Why? We had the "nice problem" of seeing usage ramp up significantly. On April 15th we sent nearly 3.1 million messages, easily our busiest day ever. Our next busiest day was the day before, at over 2.4 million messages. I haven't written a monthly update for a while, but March's output was 20% greater than February's, at nearly 48 million messages sent. So far this month we've sent 32 million already, so we're on track to blow away March's record as well, probably by a similar amount. That's the "nice" part. But the cost of all this goodness was performance started to deteriorate on the web site. That would be the "problem" side of the equation.

The good news is that as this hit, we were already working on performance improvements knowing that Gawker was about to go live. Gawker being a very busy site, we didn't want them to go live and then have us, their shiny new email service, go and disappear under all the traffic that they might send our way. As it turns out, the timing was coincidental; we just hit a critical mass of publishers around the same time that pushed our servers too close to the edge for comfort. But we were ready - and I'm glad we were.

We added an extra web server and an extra mail server to handle the load better, but (more importantly) we have made other changes that have now made the site much snappier to use and the mailings much less stressful to our infrastructure. We're supporting more subscribers, publishers and visitors with less effort than 10 days ago. FeedBlitz is now much faster and much more responsive than before (possibly ever, in fact).

So far, so good. If you're no nerdling then please disembark this post now as we have reached your destination. Otherwise, read on to find out what we did beyond enabling the extra iron.

Amazon S3

One of the biggest challenges we were facing last week, as it turns out, was not that our servers running out of steam per se - they all had CPU, bandwidth, memory and disk to spare. What we were starting to run out of was sockets for Internet connectivity. Between the WWW access, mail deliveries, TCP timeouts and HTTP keep-alives (see, I told you this would be techie) some of the servers were occasionally exhausting their socket pools, effectively taking them offline for a few seconds during busy times of the day, apparently randomly. Adding extra servers helped, to be sure, but doing so only defers the problem, and is also a relatively expensive, high-maintenance fix. We needed a more long-term solution to managing our day to day WWW usage.

And we found it. A little late to the party, perhaps, but over the last 7 days we have offloaded all the work that doesn't reflect our core value-add but is important to the web site, such as image and script file serving, to Amazon's S3 service. Our static images and scripts are now served from the cloud, and none from our servers. This is the proverbial win-win situation, as Amazon serves the images faster than we ever could, which in turn makes feedblitz.com much more responsive as well as improving our connectivity. So we solved our immediate need and got snappier site performance in the bargain.

Most of our pages now need exactly one socket access per page, to pull down the core HTML; all the other baggage comes from S3, saving about 3 connections per web site visitor, or saving us 75%. And right now it's costing us a whopping ~$3 a day for what is, effectively, an infinitely large image / asset server. It's serving our images more cheaply, more quickly, more reliably and much more manageably than we ever could or can using a self-managed dedicated server.

Obviously, I'm a fan. If you're running a site or service that is going to get big, I'm now of the opinion that you're nuts not to outsource to S3 or a similar service to store and serve objects that aren't core to your value add. It's faster, better and cheaper and whole lot less hassle. Do it!

That said, those in the know will no doubt be asking, what about the complementary Amazon services, EC2 and Simple DB? Well, we're not such a good fit there. Our code doesn't work on the EC2 infrastructure, so that's a non-starter. There may in fact be a role for SDB in future service offerings, but we've no plans to move our current database over to it right now. I will say this, though: If we were to be creating FeedBlitz now, there's no doubt in my mind that I'd use SDB (or a similar service) and S3 as the back end from the get go.

FastCGI

I also mentioned that we're not a good fit for EC2 because of the way our application is built. Won't bore you with the details. Up until this week it delivered the goods to the WWW via an old back-end protocol called CGI. Which worked nicely, but isn't known for its performance. This week we deployed new versions of the core HTML newsletter application and our email ad server using FastCGI, which (as the name implies) is like CGI, only faster. Since we're a custom app, it wasn't trivial to add FastCGI to what we do, but now we have and it's working a treat. It's reduced the load on our systems all along the stack and increased both throughput and responsiveness.

So there you have it: some re-engineering (FastCGI), selective outsourcing (S3) and extra servers have made the pain go away. Until the next nice problem to have, anyway ...

Italiano!

"Grazie" to Stefano Cazzani at http://www.vertigonet.it/ for our new Italian subscriber pages! Dutch will be next.

If you'd like to volunteer to translate our subscriber pages (about 280 strings) into your language, please write to us at the support address.

Branding your Messages: New Template Tags

In yesterday's post I remarked that Gawker's sites were using our standard template capabilities to customize their emails and subscriber landing pages. I also mentioned that we'd added a few new tags to the template; as promised here's a description.

What's a template again?

The template controls the layout (styles, fonts, logos etc.) of your content. It controls how your articles are formatted. This is contrast to the newsletter settings links in the newsletter center, which control what goes into the article in the first place. So the newsletter settings control things like tracking, truncation, comments and forward to a friend settings. The template takes the results and makes it all pretty for you.

The template editor is found in the graphic design area of your newsletter center. The template controls the layout by using custom tags inside HTML; the custom tags act as variables, substituting content such as your blog's title, content or time stamp into the HTML that becomes your newsletter or subscription form.

New Tags

There are several new tag options, now available to everyone, that we built for Gawker and a couple of other premium clients. The three main new tags are:

• <$BlogFloatImagesLeft$>
• <$BlogFloatImagesRight$>
• <$Date format="formatstring"$>

OK, so what do these do?

<$BlogFloatImagesLeft$> and <$BlogFloatImagesRight$>

The "FloatImage" tags take any image they find in the content and do their level best to force it to the left or right margins, wrapping your article text around it. They make the text more pleasing to the eye, and save space as well.

Look at Lifehacker's (one of the Gawker sites) newsletter preview, and now look at the RSS feed the newsletter is built from. In the RSS, the image floats all alone, above the text. It wastes a lot of space. In the newsletter, without the <$BlogFloatImagesLeft$> tag, it would behave exactly the same way, which is not how Gawker wanted things to look. With the tag in place, you get what you see now - the image on the left, and the text all cozied up to it, nice and friendly. If you use this tag, know that it works on all images that emerge from the content engine. So it works well if you only have one image, or their well spaced apart. If you use lots of pictures in each article, things can get bunched up and ugly. So preview it before you take it live!

<$Date format="formatstring"$>

This ought to be a popular one! You can now control the date formatting FeedBlitz puts in (still English and still US eastern, one thing at a time, people...). Programmers will know what to do with this, and you can see the results in the Lifehacker newsletter. The date in the mast head, under the logo, is the time the newsletter was generated (so that's now in the online preview). 3 letter day name, 3 letter month, date, year. Now, if you look at each article, you'll see the time it was posted (FeedBlitz pulls this information from the RSS). Hours and minutes are added. (Both are upper case because of the styles that are applied to the dates once generated).

Both dates use the new <$Date$> syntax, but with different format strings. Here are some format strings and what they do for the time February 9, 2008, 2:45 PM

Date Tag	Output
<$Date format="%m/%d/%Y"$>	02/09/2008
<$Date format="%d.%m.%Y"$>	09.02.2008
<$Date format="%Y-%m-%d"$>	2008-09-02
<$Date format="%a, %b %d %Y, %I:%M %p"$>	Sat, Feb 09 2008, 2:45 P.M.
<$Date format="%B %d %Y, %H:%M"$>	February 09 2008, 14:45
<$Date format="%A - %H:%M"$>	Saturday - 14:45

There are a couple more new tags but I suspect they'll be rarely used; you can find them all listed under the template editor itself. Access your template editor using the "graphic design" link in your Newsletter Center.

Gawker Media Weekly News Updates

Gawker Media, the company that runs some of the best-known blogs ever, last week started to offer weekly updates of the top 5 stories via FeedBlitz. You can subscribe to Gawker's weekly newsletters from any page on a Gawker site using the form at the end of the contacts section in the left hand column. Now they're up & running, newsletter management and delivery is completely automated, giving each site's fans another way to increase their engagement with their favorite online media resource.

Each Gawker site extensively of customizes the newsletter and subscriber pages, to parallel their parent web sites. All this is achieved using FeedBlitz standard templates (although, to be fair, we added some features to accommodate Gawker's needs, but these capabilities are now available to everyone; more in a later post).

Click on the preview links below to see the current online version, and click the "subscribe" links to see how the subscription forms are laid out with each sites branding. Might as well subscribe, while you're there :-) You can click through to the main site from the logo at the top of any of these pages. (N.B. If you're not familiar with Gawker sites, be aware that they are well written but often irreverent, somewhat profane, sometimes politically incorrect and frequently deal with topics you might not want to discuss with your mother. Which is why they're so popular, of course, but don't say you weren't warned...).

• Consumerist Top Stories of the Week - Shoppers bite back - Subscribe
• Deadspin Top Stories of the Week - Sports news without access, favor, or discretion - Subscribe
• Defamer Top Stories of the Week - Defamer, the L.A. Gossip Rag - Subscribe
• Gawker Top Stories of the Week - Media gossip and pop culture round the clock - Subscribe
• Gizmodo Top Stories of the Week - Gizmodo, the gadget guide. So much in love with shiny new toys, it's unnatural - Subscribe
• Gridskipper Top Stories of the Week - The urban travel guide - Subscribe
• Idolator Top Stories of the Week - All about the music... If only it were - Subscribe
• io9 Top Stories of the Week - Strung out on science fiction - Subscribe
• Jalopnik Top Stories of the Week - Obsessed with the cult of cars - Subscribe
• Jezebel Top Stories of the Week - Celebrity, sex, fashion. Without airbrushing - Subscribe
• Kotaku Top Stories of the Week - Gossip, news and leaks for obsessive gamers - Subscribe
• Lifehacker Top Stories of the Week - Tech tricks, tips and downloads for getting things done - Subscribe
• Valleywag Top Stories of the Week - Silicon Valley's Tech Gossip Rag - Subscribe
• Wonkette Top Stories of the Week - The DC Gossip - Subscribe

My main point is this. Look at the art of the possible that these newsletters show can be built with FeedBlitz, and consider: Is your brand - personal, professional, corporate - being carried through to your email conversations like these? And, seeing these newsletters, do you think you could do more to reinforce your identity?

All is achieved with the FeedBlitz template capabilities, accessed from the "Graphic Design" section of your Newsletter Center. If you are currently using the FeedBlitz default layout (friendly orange logo in the upper left), take a look. You can customize subject lines, from names and addresses, and (as these Gawker titles show) almost everything about the look and feel of your HTML newsletters and subscriber landing pages. All publishers can customize their template; you don't have to be a premium (paying) publisher to do this.

I hope that we've inspired you to revisit your emails look and feel. Tomorrow I'll write in more detail about how the templates were constructed and the new HTML newsletter template capbilities we now offer.

Need more convincing? Here are some more designs that have been built and used in FeedBlitz mailings.