Fedafi - Wordpress Plugin for RSS

UPDATE >> 23rd Dec 2006
We thought what the hell, why not take on Feedburner, looks like they’ve had their own way for long enough, so we are launching a Wordpress Plugin, which styles, tracks and allows you to monetize your RSS feed - all for free!

With this weeks launch of the latest version of Fedafi we sent out some demo accounts to some key industry and business people. The feedback has been great, so a big thanks to all who took time out of their busy schedules to take a look and play for a while.

A couple of comments echoed something we’ve heard from users, comparing Fedafi to Feedburner.

Okay, but we are two guys working from a ‘garage’ in Glasgow, self-funding the launch, Feedburner is a VC funded corporation probably with a bevy of PR and marketing staff who’ve been around for 3 years and I’m guessing deep pockets. So, not a lot in common there.

As for our respective products there are some major differences too:

• Fedafi creates RSS feeds as well as styling and tracking external feeds
• Fedafi installs on your domain, it’s not a central application that gives you a user account
• Fedafi lets you have full control over feed styling, brand it for your business
• If our server dies it has no impact on your feeds or data
• Fedafi lets you create, style, track unlimited feeds
• We don’t have access to your metrics, only you do
• If your site doesn’t already have an RSS feed then Feedburner is no use to you, Fedafi on the other hand is

We didn’t set out to take on Feedburner head to head, we wanted to give people a product that gives webmasters and marketers full control over RSS in a simple non-technical way and that includes their external feeds such as those created by their blog.

So, we do some similar things to Feedburner, but we do them in different ways and we also provide a host of other features that are not available on Feedburner, just like they have features we don’t provide, such as feed advertising. We have great respect for the Feedburner guys, they’ve built a large loyal user base, have a great product and we haven’t set out to ‘crush’ them, that would be crazy. I think we do things very differently, we set out to help those who wanted to create their own RSS channel easily, do so.

We know people will draw comparisons and that’s okay, we know we’ve got a long way to go and we are getting there. We also know we have a product that can help every single webmaster squeeze more out of their marketing effort.

Those people who ‘get it’ are already using RSS to drive traffic and sales, creating channels for communication, distributing content to a wide variety of devices and much more by creating their own RSS feeds.

When IE7 gains traction every webmaster who is serious about marketing will want the little orange RSS graphic to show in the address bar of their site and that’s the real power of Fedafi.

Fedafi allows everyone to get the little orange graphic, no blogging required.

Okay after a great deal of sweat (equity) we’ve released the new version of Fedafi. With a whole new bunch of features.

As well as being able to create, manage, market and track RSS feeds Fedafi now just just as good a job with feeds created elsewhere.

You can now style and track your blogs RSS feed right on your own site, no need to use someone else’s domain name. Just enter your feed URL and you’ll get it styled, with full instructions to all visitors on how they can use the feed, including one click subscribe buttons for Pageflakes, Netvibes, My Yahoo, My Google, Windows Live and Excite Mix.

The cool stuff doesn’t stop there. As well as tracking subscribers to your blog feed it will also track clicks on every outbound link. This means you can see which articles, headlines and links are popular. Giving you the metrics to fine tune your blogging content.

Take a look at a Wordpress blog feed thats been Fedafi’d here.

For those who don’t want to, or don’t have a website to install Fedafi on we have released a hosted version. You can use a sub-domain of a generic RSS domain name that we supply or use your own domain name at no extra cost.

All in all Fedafi puts control of your RSS back in your hands.

Heidi Cohen has posted a very easy to digest list of 10 ways marketers can use RSS. Heidi makes some really good points in the article, including:

Using RSS to extend your marketing is about parsing content into small, easily digestible chunks that consumers want. The average Bloglines reader voluntarily consumes about 20 feeds a day.

From a marketing perspective, you must convert your content into compelling information feeds that consumers want to receive. This content falls into three categories:

• Category-level feeds
• Granular product information
• Niche content related to your offering that keeps readers engaged with your brand.

Check out the full article for more

You know something is good when you keep trying to find new things to do with it just because it can. And that’s what the new release of Fedafi is like. It’s not released until later today, maybe tomorrow morning but the new external feed styling and tracking is really cool.

Take a look at our feed, created by Wordpress but styled and tracked by Fedafi.

We’ve thrown together some demo feeds for testing including Flickr, take a look:

• Here’s a Flickr feed styled and tracked by Fedafi

It also works just as well on Blogger and Typepad feeds.

It’s been a busy month! Since attending Second Chance Tuesday things have just seemed to take off. I met up with some great folk there, including some from the VC community, however, some of the events since then have surprised even me. Look out for more news on this shortly.

As for Fedafi we are about to launch some great new features and services.

Firstly, external feeds. Since we launched we’ve had lots of people see Fedafi as a Feedburner rival. We never intended this, but we can’t ignore it. So, in this weeks release Fedafi will enable full styling and tracking of external feeds. As long as your blog produces an RSS 2.0 feed Fedafi can work its magic. That includes Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad and Moveable Type. All can be styled, subscribers tracked and clicks on outbound links tracked whilst retaining full control on your own domain space.

The second major change is really tied to the first. Because so many users, such as those who use Blogger and Typepad don’t have their own web space they can’t install Fedafi. So, we will be introducing a hosted version of Fedafi. Sign up, login and start. It will be available using either your own domain name or a sub-domain based on feedformat.com a domain we will use for this service. Priced from $3.75 per month each account gets its own, personal install of fedafi ready to use with full FTP access.

The third major change is our website. We are making our install of Feed Validator available to the public and adding some great RSS tools, including:

1. Feed to JavaScript. We have installed a tool that lets you easily grab a small code snippet to place on any website. This will then show your feed live on the site.
2. Online feed builder. For those who don’t need or want to use all of the bells and whistles Fedafi offers we have created a tool that will build a valid RSS 2.0 feed. Fill in a few boxes, click and grab the code to use where you want.
3. A feed subscription button maker. This tool will create the code you need to put small graphics on your site to allow your users to one click subscribe to your feed at 6 of the major online feed aggregators, My Yahoo, My Google, Netvibes, Pageflakes, Bloglines and Excite Mix.

Watch this space as the new version of Fedafi and site will be launched soon.

Mark Woodman has just made a really great post over at inkBlots, listing the reasons he hears and asking for suggestions, Mark also gives some great answers to them.

I thought it was worth just pointing to some tips on using SSL (https) for feeds. RSSReader tends to spit them out so I found that Steven Garrity has put together some research into feed readers that handls https feeds and feeds that use basic http authentication, it can be found here.

The results are:

iFeedReaders have put together a nice little chicklet creator that will produce HTML you can paste into your website to make subscription to your RSS feed easier for your users.

If you just want to grab all of the chicklet images you can download a zip file here.

I noticed this article (5 reasons why rss feeds are not popular) over at Hiveminds has been tagged at del.icio.us a couple of times today. The article raises 4 reasons and makes one suggestion, reasons:

1. RSS is still unknown
2. RSS feeds fail frequently
3. RSS Feeds are sensitive
4. Feeds that have been removed

Suggestion:

1. A notification service is needed

One: RSS is still unkown:

The author states:

I recently participated in a seminar for social networking and only 2 of the 20 persons I spoke to used and understood RSS.

Although true I think it may miss the big picture and that is ‘many people use RSS without knowing it‘ so yes there’s still work to do but don’t confuse people not knowing what RSS with and RSS being unpopular - My Yahoo, My Google, Pageflakes, Netvibes, Excite Mix all ways people are transparently consuming RSS.

My wife uses RSS to track feeds at Flickr in her Google home page, yet she has no idea what RSS is and to be honest she’s not interested in knowing, as long as it continues to do what she wants. You wanna know how MSDOS works or do you just want to switch your PC on and have it work? Maybe not a good example
Two and Three:Â RSS feeds fail frequently and RSS Feeds are sensitive:

This is mainly due to the fact people are using systems that were never meant to deliver RSS - they do other things, such as content management, RSS being a bolt on. A purpose built RSS generator should take care of handling most of lifes little mishaps, ours sure does.

Four: feeds removed:

What can you say, it can happen to the best of us, but certainly needs care not to move/delete feeds.

Five:Â A notification service is needed

I think as more and more people take provision of feeds more seriously this will become less of an issue, systems will stop creating crap feeds or people will stop using crap systems that create them.

Microsoft didn’t focus on teaching us MSDOS or even Windows, they set about showing us solutions we could use and implement, things that made our life easy and more productive, the same goes for RSS, we don’t need people to understand it, just as long as we make it easy for them to consume.

Just a thanks and mention for Orli Yakuel ’s web project Go2web20 which looks like it is climbing up the charts as a really easy way of finding Web 2.0 sites.

Using a wonderfully simple Flash interface Go2web2 is a really great way of finding Web 2.0 sites.