Lately we often encounter a strange Paypal behaviour. Paypal cancels all active subscriptions done with a credit card automatically as soon as this credit card gets changed, replaced, out of date whatever. Unfortunately we have no influence on this and are not even informed in advance.

Please don't worry, the solution is simple as: Just wait until your subscribed 12 months run out. Our system will send you a mail and you can simply renew your subscription manually by upgrading again.

Some of our users get error messages on their websites when trying to use the PHP integration code. They look like this: "Warning readfile(): URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration in [file]". Basically, it means that your provider does not allow your scripts to load files from the web via PHP and HTTP into your website.

So what can you do then?

First you can should try to persuade your provider to enable URL file-acces for your webhost.
If the provider is not willing to do so you can try a workaround by using CURL: http://at2.php.net/curl
You will find lots of tutorials and examples on Google: http://www.google.com/#q=curl+example+php

If CURL does not work in your case you can still use Javascript integration. However, from the search-engine-optimization point of view Javascript integration is not recommended.

Quite often our users want to display feeds from Google in RSSboxes. This is actually a good way of getting accurate and precise information on whatever topic they are interested in. However, sometimes a rather strange problem occurs which we want to discuss here.

The problem

Try to use the URL of an english Google News feed at rssinclude.com. The resulting RSSbox does not contain an english but a german feed. That's pretty strange, isn't it?

The reason

Google identifies the location of the server requesting the feed. According to the servers location Google provides the feed in a language it assumes to be appropriate. Which is not good for our service as our server is located in Germany.

The workaround

You can force Google to use a certain language for the feed.  Just add the term "&hl=en" (for english) to the end of your feed url.

Original, problematic URL: http://news.google.com/news?q=motor+sport&output=rss

Changed, well working URL: http://news.google.com/news?q=motor+sport&output=rss&hl=en

Any questions?

If you have questions concerning this or other topics please don't hesitate to contact us.

The "Simple Ticker Box" shows an RSS feed, one item at a time, in a news ticker style. It comes with two different switching transitions and spices up your website for free!

Try it

If you want to configure and adjust all the properties of your new ticker RSSbox please use the advanced box type "Ticker Box Extended". Extended means:

• More transition styles
• Change transition speed and delay
• Configure all relevant colors
• Adjust box size to your needs
• Get rid of our dispensable back-link  ;)

Have a look at some examples here!

The extended version of the ticker box and its new features are only available for premium users. If you are not a premium users already, this could be the perfect opportunity to upgrade  :)  For more information on this topic please visit our upgrade page.

Do you want your website visitors to include your own feed into their websites and blogs? Now you can provide a link on your website which lets others create an RSSbox with your feed straight away.

How it works...

1. Open this page and generate a link containing your feed url.

2. Put the link on your website (or whereever you want...)

3. A visitor on your page clicks the link and will be directed to RSSinclude.com. Your feed is predefined in the box which the visitor creates subsequently. The visitor puts your feed on his website.

Feedback

Please send us your feedback if you use this feature. Don't forget to enclose the url of your website so we can see how you have implemented the RSS-To-HTML link. Perhaps we can write a blog about your case then :)

We had quite a few updates lately. They contained a lot of enhancements and new features for you:

Copy Your RSSboxes And Save Time

Premium users can copy their own RSSboxes now by clicking the "Duplicate" link in "My RSSboxes". This helps a lot when creating several boxes in the same design and layout. This feature saves premium users a lot of time!

Arrange Item Elements in Naked HTML Box

Premium users frequently told us their need to set the exact order and visibility of the feed elements (item title, item description, item date) shown in their "Naked HTML" box. No more waiting! We have enhanced the box according to your wishes. Just have a look at the "Content and Styling Options" in your "Naked HTML" box administration.

Faster Updating Of Feed Contents

Furthermore, we adjusted the way our caching mechanism works to ensure the best possible service for premium users. The RSSboxes of premium users are now updated faster than those of free users. Premium users can even update their feeds manually now when they are logged in at their account.

User-Friendly Box Management

For our heavy users we have enhanced the box overview which you find on the "My RSSboxes" page. We have implemented a search and filter form. Additionally, you can browse your boxes by using the paging feature.

Feed Backlink

Another new feature concerns all users: Everybody can use the option "Box Title Links Back to RSS Feed" now. If the option is checked the title of the box links back to the feed url which is specified in the feed XML itself.

Do you want to use all features of RSSinclude.com? If yes, please upgrade here.

Since we have implemented a new kind of feed updating mechanism using distributed servers the average feed updating time has become much shorter for premium users. We strive for a shorter caching time for our premium users as this is what most of them look for. Here are some recent key figures:

Premium feeds are updated every 30 min at the moment. So the average feed age of premium feeds is about 15 min.

Free users feeds are updated every 90 min at the moment. The average feed age of free feeds is fluctuating around 40-45 min.

We love to see how our service is used out there. Have a look at the website http://www.kprs.com for example and scroll down to the bottom of the page. There you can find three RSSboxes.

The Kansas City radio station KPRS uses RSSinclude.com to provide current topics concerning R&B/Soul music and DVDs. Content from About.com is dragged to the KPRS website via RSSinclude.com. Which is quite a good idea! Because About.com is known for having fresh content with high quality.

About.com has lots of different topic categories. So if you are looking for fresh content for your website just try it... We did so too and included the feed concerning the topic "Radio" in this blog:

The rssinclude.com website was down most of the time during about 6 hours today. The delivery of RSSboxes was also affected in some periods within this timeframe.

Since we assumed at first that this downtime could be self-induced and a follow-up bug of yesterdays update we started to search the problem on the wrong end.

Soon it became clear that our system was under an on-going Distributed Denial of Service attack that grounded our service. This has been a planned attack and we are working hard to fully resolve this issue.

Right now all systems are back up to normal operation.

I want to apologize for what is a critical failure in our service to you and your clients.

Adi
on behalf of the rssinclude.com team

Due to the rising number of users on rssinclude.com we had to think over the feed update strategy during the last weeks. As a result we updated our system today to crawl the feeds through a small cluster of distributed servers.

Unfortunately a minor programming error had a major impact on one of these crawling servers which was setup with a slightly different system configuration. This server started to return wrong content for the feeds it was responsible for.

The problem was solved within a few hours and only a small amount of RSSboxes were hit by this bug at all.

We apologize deeply for any troubles this may have caused on our users websites!

[Update: I didn't know it at this time, but the nightmare was just about to start! Read more on the next blog post.]