Blogarithm Acquisition

We are proud and excited to announce that the Blogarithm service has been acquired by Blue Sky Factory, one of today’s leading email marketing service providers. Blue Sky Factory also provides RSSFWD (www.rssfwd.com), a leading provider of RSS to email technology solutions.

We are excited about this because the merging of Blogarithm and RSSFWD will provide a variety of enhancements to our current service, including timelier updates and a variety of new configuration options. We know you’ll love this too!

Here’s what’s going to happen and what it means to you:

1. Starting soon, all new subscriptions coming from existing blog forms will go to RSSFWD. New subscriptions for those with existing accounts will be added to their Blogarithm accounts.
2. Unless you choose to opt out (more details coming soon), your account will be moved to the RSSFWD system, using settings which approximate your current settings.
3. After your account is moved to RSSFWD you will receive a welcome message with instructions for modifying your settings if you desire.

IMPORTANT NOTE: All of this unfortunately comes at the cost of an important Blogarithm feature, which is the ability to track blogs or other websites that do not have a “feed”. Most blogs these days provide a “feed”, which allows software and services such as Blogarithm and RSSFWD to easily recognize changes on the site. In fact, a popular format for these feeds is “RSS”, which is where RSSFWD gets its name. RSSFWD only works with blogs and other websites that provide feeds and so if a blog to which you are subscribed does not provide a feed it will no longer work once your account is moved. We deeply apologize for this, but it has proven impossible to provide this type of website tracking without compromising performance (as many of you might have noticed in recent months on Blogarithm). The good news is that once you move to RSSFWD you’ll be able to get email updates as quickly as within an hour or two or less after a blog is changed.

We are so glad to have been able to have served you for over 5 years now and we are very confident that if you like Blogarithm you’ll love the fantastic features available at RSSFWD.

Best wishes and Happy Holidays,

Max and Andy
-The Blogarithm Team

Domain problems

Spam filters are not always your friend. We missed our domain renewal notice, so were a day late. Because of that, some folks have lost the ability to get to our site. This problem should resolve itself over the next day as the domain registration re-propagates through the Internet.

A place for everything...

and everything in its place.

That is what you have been asking for. You have probably noticed that as you subscribe to new blogs, they either end up at the end of your blogmail, or jumbled somewhere in the middle. If you track a lot of blogs, it can be kind of annoying.

Max and I are happy to announce a new feature to change all that. With our new categories page, you can rearrange your subscriptions however you would like. Put them in an order that makes sense to you. Create categories and group blogs together logically. Here is how it works:

• Use your mouse to drag subscriptions into any order you wish. Click inside the box and move them around. Try it!


• Use the new category button to add a category. Name it whatever you wish! Drag it around to rearrange the category order. You can rename any time with the rename button.


• Remove a category with the delete button. It won't let you delete unless there are no blogs in the category.


• Save your work at any time with the save the layout button.


• To move a blog between categories, you have two options: you can just drag it there, or (if it's off the screen) you can use the move to button to send the blog to another category.


• If you want to delete a blog, use the X button. That will unsubscribe you to the blog, just as if you unsubscribed from the main account page.

There you have it! The category information is used everywhere on the site -- in your nightly BlogMail (tm), on the account page, in your blogroll. Use categories, and have everything in just the right place.

All For One And One For All

Or maybe just "all or one."

After we added a list of articles to our detail pages (More Detail), we were asked why we couldn't do the same thing in the nightly BlogMail. We can, and now we have! Now you can elect to get summaries of all the new articles that have been posted since we last sent you blogmail, instead of just the latest. To enable this feature, go to the options section of the account page and set "Articles to Show" to "All New". You can go back to receiving only the one latest summary by choosing "Only Latest."

A few caveats:

• You must be receiving the HTML-formatted BlogMail to be able to get article summaries.


• Some blogs don't provide dates for individual articles. In that case, we will continue sending only the latest article.


• Some blogs don't provide the data on the individual articles (in tech speak: no RSS) and we will keep showing only a link to those blog.

Hope you enjoy the new feature. Please keep those suggestions coming -- we always are interested in knowing about ways we can improve the service for you.

Pump up your account

Now you can subscribe to multiple blogs in just a few seconds using our new bulk import page! Subscribe to as many blogs as you like in two quick steps -- upload a subscription list and then pick which blogs on the list to subscribe to.

You have many options for making the list.

• Upload a file to Blogarithm, and we will find all the web addresses in it. It works with any file: Word, Excel, saved web pages. Try it with anything!


• Give us a web page, and we'll find all the link in it. For example, you can subscribe to the top 100 RSS feeds in just a few seconds.


• Type or paste in a list of addresses, and we'll create a subscription list from what you type in.

What if you don't have a Blogarithm account? Now you can create one without needing to make a subscription first, using the new account creation page. Make an account, set up your password, and you are all set to import blogs!

View BlogMail online

We occasionally get email from customers who have not received their BlogMail properly for one reason or another. Sometimes it is caught in a spam filter, sometimes we didn't detect a change properly, sometimes it just went missing in the ether. Whatever the reason, missing BlogMail is annoying, so we've created a feature to help deal with it.

At the top of your account page is a new "Account Status" section. It shows the date and time we last sent you email and gives you the ability to see your last email in a web page or to resend it to yourself. If you ever have a question about where your BlogMail is, you can check here and not have to send us an email and wait for a reply. Of course, if you still don't receive it, please contact us at support@blogarithm.com.

More detail

We've added article excerpts to our blog detail pages, similar to the ones we send out in the nightly blogmail. Some examples:

• Beauty Addict
• April's Beach Vollyball Log
• MrSikhNet.com

On a Roll

On a blogroll, that is. You can now create a blogroll for your site directly from your Blogarithm account. Enable it on your blogrolling page. (Detailed instructions are here.)

We've built in two different types of customization. First, you can pick exactly which of your subscriptions is public and which remain private, just in case you don't want the world to know of your fascination with Sponge Bob. And you can also change the look of the blogroll with our style editor.

Happy blogrolling!

Bloglet Move Tool

We are happy to announce a new tool for bloggers with Bloglet accounts, our Bloglet Move Tool. Now you can move all of your Bloglet users to Blogarithm with just two steps:

• Log in with your Bloglet email and password.


• Choose which blogs to import and click "Move to blogarithm."

We were prompted to build this because of Beauty Addict, who moved over several hundred subscriptions by hand! You don't have to go through that effort. Just take the two steps above, and you can move over as many subscriptions as you have.

Vacation, All I Ever Wanted

The only bad thing about taking a vacation is all the email to come back to. I usually have about 6,000 messages waiting for me -- I'll do anything to reduce that backlog.

Robin from Artist's Inspiration will, too. So when she was planning her vacation, she wanted to suspend her BlogMail for the duration. She contacted us asking how, and the result was our new "suspend" vacation feature, which let's you stop receiving BlogMail until some future date.

Here's how it works:

• Log in to your account page.


• Scroll down to the "Suspend Email" section.


• Enter in the date you are coming back, and click "suspend email."


• We will stop sending you email until that date. Best of all, when you get back, your first email will have all the changes to all your blogs since the day you left!


• If you get back early, just click "resume email" to begin receiving emails immediately.

We were very happy to add this for Robin, and we appreciate her thank you: Personal Service in an Impersonal World. Have a great trip, Robin!