Feed Crier new features
5 Sep 2006
Feed Crier has a number of new features, if you’re into those sorts of things. Most of the features quietly fade into the background. Those are oftent he best kind of features because you don’t really need to know about them in order to take advantage of them. But for those keeping score, here you go...
- Feed autodiscovery means that Feed Crier will try and find a feed for you if you only give it the web site address. Subscribe to http://kalsey.com/ and Feed Crier will figure out where the feed’s at and subscribe you to it. the site doesn’t even need to have the RSS autodiscovery headers set up, although if they’re present, Feed Crier will happily use them.
- Want to track the number of subscribers with Feedburner, Pheedo or others? Feed Crier now tells feed metrics services how many subscribers there are to a feed. Implementing a feed metrics tool and want to know the technical details of this? It’s easy; just look for (NNN subscribers) in the user agent header. The NNN is the number of subscribers.
- Feed Crier is conserving bandwidth—both mine and yours—with etag support. If your feed’s web server sends etags, Feed Crier will play nice and send them back.
- Easily add feeds to Feed Crier with a handy Bookmarklet. Just click it when you’re on a site and the feed will be popped into Feed Crier.
- Smarter subscription confirmations mean that if you subscribe via IM, you no longer need to confirm your subscription. And all the new user stuff that Feed Crier needs to tell you about is only included if you’ve never subscribed to a feed before.
- Publishers, you can add an enhanced web form and let readers subscribe to IM alerts without ever leaving your site. This little bit is under documented right now, so if you’re itching to try it, contact me and let me know.
- Lots of human touches have been added to make using Feed Crier just a little more pleasant.
What are you waiting for? Try Feed Crier today!