Archive for the ‘releases’ Category
Who needs a pen? A new txtFeeder Feature
Monday, October 19th, 2009I am proud to announce a new feature! txtFeeder Notes. Now, not only will you avoid data charges, but you can now stop carrying pens! Ever been somewhere and needed to jot something down but don’t have a pen? Now you can just send a text to txtFeeder, and it will save your note. You can view your notes online, or through a text message command read the note any time you need it.
You’ll also notice you can now reset your password from your account page, in case you need to.
Log into your account to try this new feature out! If you haven’t joined yet, now is the time!
Helping you avoid data charges for 1 month!
Saturday, October 3rd, 2009That’s right, we’ve been helping you avoid data charges for 1 month! Today is the 1 month anniversary of the txtFeeder Launch. New users are signing up every day, and giving some good feedback. Heres some things that have been happening here:
- Message Stats in your account
- Efficiency increases
- Feed previews
- Phone synchronization for better compatibility with a larger variety of phones
I’ve been getting some feature requests, some of them, seem like good ideas, some of them… well, lets just say not all of them have been useful. At this time, helping you avoid data charges, is txtFeeder’s #1 priority. So additional features may not come for a while… But here are a few notable suggestions:
- ‘I want to be able to send emails through text messages, and have them come from my email address’ – This raises a lot of privacy/security issues. While, I believe it would be a good feature, I am not sure, at this time, that it is something I will build into this.
- ‘Can I send txtFeeder a note, and have it save it for later retrieval? Like a phone number, or an address’ I like this idea, and one day, I may build this in.
- ‘I only get X number of texts per month, can txtFeeder stop sending me texts after I hit this number?’ Some type of alerting may be possible in the future. I may build a command that will allow you to retrieve your stats for the current calendar month.
- ‘Can txtFeeder send me a feed at a specific time of day everyday automatically?’ That feature is actually available from a number of other ’subscription’ services. The purpose of txtFeeder is to be ‘on demand’. So you only receive texts when you ask for them.
As always, report any problems you have, share txtFeeder with your friends, and enjoy!
New Feature: Account Usage Statistics
Wednesday, September 9th, 2009You’ll notice on the your account page, you have a new tab called ’stats’! View your monthly stats. I got some feedback from users who don’t have unlimited text messages, so to help them avoid going over their monthly limit, I’ve now included statistics. Using this service is meant to avoid data charges on your phone, and the best way I can do that is to provide you with as much information as I can. I still suggest getting unlimited texting, if you’re going to use this service regularly, as its easy to get a lot of texts without realizing it, but hopefully this will help anyone having trouble monitoring their usage.
This shows you the number of messages you have received from txtFeeder.
There may be some delay, but it should be pretty minimal.
This shows the number of text message you have sent txtFeeder.
Between these two graphs you should be able to easily monitor your text usage with this service, and in addition to just avoiding data charges, avoid any text limits you may have with your carrier. As always, read the FAQ if you have any questions, or report a problem if you experience any.
txtFeeder Beta Launch!
Saturday, September 5th, 2009txtFeeder is open for use! Join Now and begin reading feeds on your mobile! Its easy to set up, and can save you a great deal of money on data charges from your mobile carrier! Read How txtFeeder Works to see how easy it is!
Share Feeds!
Friday, June 5th, 2009Still not open for Beta testing, however, I have added a more ‘community’ like feature. You can now share your feeds with everyone else, search through others’ shared feeds, as well as see other users’ profiles and which feeds they are sharing. I don’t plan on adding much more ‘community’ type features, but its definitely an open for discussion down the road.
Should be launching a Beta soon. I’ll keep you posted…
Final Feature additions before a possible Beta Release
Sunday, May 10th, 2009I’ve finally got some better administrative features going on. Drag and Drop feed re-organization is functioning pretty well, and now, I’m happy to announce you can now search for feeds (using Google’s AJAX API). Should make the experience a lot nicer, and will keep me happy with it for a while.
Hoping to get things officially ‘published’ in a ‘Beta’ type mode so I can see how all this will work with a little stress. At this point, stress testing as been… well… pretty low priority. I’ve got everything *functioning* the way I want, so once I get some people using this, I may have some tweaking to do, but I am pretty confident it’ll hold up pretty well.
New Commands and Faster processing!
Friday, April 17th, 2009New commands have been added, as well as alternative commands. There are a few alternative commands, to help reduce the amount of texts having to be sent, because you forgot the exact command. It’s saved me a lot of time during testing, because I keep swapping the order of some of the words, only to get error messages.
- help – lists out the current commands
- feed list/list feeds
Friendlier error messages, no more pesky server errors in your cell’s inbox, and hopefully, every time you send a text, you’ll get a response. Testing thus far returns a response 99.9% of the time. Working to make sure it stays that way…
I’ve re-worked how feeds are being read, displayed, and sent, so things should process much faster. In my tests, response time is about 30 seconds – 1 minute… I am working to decrease this time even further, though, I am not sure I’ll be able to do much better than that… We will see.. I’ll keep you posted!
txtFeeder Functional!
Saturday, April 4th, 2009I am happy to announce a preliminary alpha version of txtFeeder is now functional. Basic features, include the following SMS commands:
- feed list
- feed 1
- read 1a
Administration includes adding feeds by URL only. The response time is approximately 2-3 minutes, as the server is processing messages every 2 minutes. New features to be added soon, including new commands, and possible, an easier way to add and re-order feeds.