Please give me feedback on my project-- RSS digests via email. | Hacker News Reader

Please give me feedback on my project-- RSS digests via email.

peekfeed.com

22 pointstymekpavel25 comments

I really like getting RSS by email, because I can avoid using another product (an RSS reader) but still get the feeds I want without having to browse out to them everyday. I've found I waste less time browsing blogs ever since I switched to a once-a-day digest.

It'd be nice to set the time you get the digest, in addition to specifying how often you get it. I also found the URLs on the right side (once you're logged in) are cut a bit short, perhaps you could display the full URL on hover?

Thanks for the suggestion! I'll also include the title of the feed along with the url.

Nice. I'd been looking for some way to consolidate information gathering into one app (email), and tried feedmyinbox at one point (ended up giving up on it because, at the time, it could not do digests).

With regard to the UI, I'd appreciate a cue telling me when to expect the next digest. I see that it's on a 24-hour cycle, but is that on the stroke of midnight? Midnight in which time zone? Is that 24 hours since the last time I added a feed?

Thanks for the suggestion! I'll add a timing option so users can choose whether they want digests to arrive at 8am, 1pm, etc...

I signed up for the service, and noticed a couple of things.

First, even though I chose 24-hour notification, I seem to have been getting emails every hour. Feature or bug? :)

Second, it seems that the NYT feed reposts its full content in each email, even though articles repeat. I didn't check to see if the feed is different in its entirety, but I think that each mail sent out should only include previously unsent articles (you may have to filter by subscriber by permalink or possibly by subscriber by message hash to catch changed messages).

Interesting, I'll look into it-- we haven't experienced that problem yet.

As for the NYT feed, thanks for the suggestion. I'm on it!

It seems to me (and I might be wrong) that a large portion of your customer base might be people that are comfortable with email but not RSS, and thus could benefit from a sentence of copy on what exactly RSS does for them.

Not bad. Immediate thought is that I would like to have the ability to make more than 1 digest. I don't really want -everything- all at once. I might want all my deal feeds to come in one email, and all my news feeds to come in another email.

A simple [Add new digest] feature would be nice, where each digest can be set up on a different schedule, and with a custom email subject line. Then when you add, you add a feed to a particular digest.

I've put individual digests on the to-do, thanks for the idea!

Nice one. This is exactly what I was looking at.

A note about using PHP's mail function. Sending excessive mails from one IP may get it blacklisted, unless you take special measures. Sending mail reliably is hard and doing it on a large scale is even harder.

BTW, is it on shared host or a VPS?

see, already, gmail classified your account activation mail as spam.

thanks for the heads up, i believe i've fixed the problem.

Interesting.

One competitor, xFruits, has been around for a while and offers quite a few methods for transforming data from one form to another (RSS to email, mobile, voice, etc.) http://www.xfruits.com/

Thanks for the heads up!

demo account details:

     username: demo@peekfeed.com
     password: demo

...or make a free account and try it out!

Which email client users are you targetting?

Thunderbird and gmail both have abilities to show RSS feeds natively (gmail via web links).

The formatting is designed for the Peek (www.getpeek.com), but can be used with a variety of mobile and non-mobile email clients.

Any thoughts on adding an API so that sites can use your service to offer email digests of their posts?

Thanks for the idea! I'll put an API on my to-do list. I'm thinking of allowing users to develop modules, so they can custom format whatever site they want. These modules would be available through the "Select Feed Type..." menu.

Great. I know my team would definitely be interested in leveraging this tool if it worked that way. I'm envisioning it looking something like AddThis or SocialTwist. You mouse-over an embedded item that gives you the opportunity to sign up for daily/weekly/monthly digests via email. Anyway, I've bookmarked this. Looking forward to seeing more.

I like it. What are you using to send the email? Simple HTML functions or perhaps something more sophisticated, like phpList?

interesting, i didn't know about phpList-- perhaps i'll use is somehow in the next release. at the moment i'm using simple PHP to send out the emails.

teach question if i may what configuration do u use for the email sending ? did you set up smtp server to deal with the load. or are u using what ever scripting language build in tools for sending emails Thanks

i'm using php to send out the digests using the mail() command. the service was coded in python, php, and ajax.

how dows it compare to feedmyinbox.com? Did you try both? Which one would you choose?

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