Step 1 - Go to Technorati.com and sign up for a free account, and after you've done that, click on the link: "Claim your blog"

Step 2 - Put your HitRSS-powered blog link. As you very well know - your blog link cosists of two parts:

General HitRSS blog URL (http://blogs.hitrss.com/) + your HitRSS user name (this blog: hitrss)

Step 3 - Choose your claim method - the easiest one is the "Post Claim" method, which means that you will add a new post (in HitRSS: "new feed item") so that Technorati can recognize the blog is yours.

Technorati will give you exact instructions as to how the Post Claim method works:

So before you proceed in Technorati, open a new browser window and log in to your HitRSS account and click on the link "Add feed items" and later on the button "Add new feed item", in the News feed editor just click on the button "Source" and paste the code Technorati gave you above:

After you've added the code, just click on the button "Submit the News" to save it.

Step 4 - Go back to Technorati window and click on the button "Release the spiders" and Technorati will visit your blog and recognize it's yours thanks to the code you pasted above. Once it's done that, you will see the confirmation screen:

You can add your blog description now and define your blog's language and add tags. Take your time and fill in this information so that your future readers would know what your blog is all about.

Step 5 - You're almost done. Now that Technorati knows the blog is yours, go back to the browser window with your HitRSS account open and remove the feed item with the Technorati code:

Just select the news item and click on the "Remove" button on the top-right side of the list.

Congratulations! You have added your blog to Technorati!

If you go back to the Technorati browser window you will see this confirmation message:

Hope this Tutorial was useful for you. Using this simple method we've been adding our blogs to Technorati very successfully.

Technorati tags: rss, feeds, marketing, nozbe, web-20, blogging, blogs, blog, web, technorati

I will comment on these updates in detail over next few days, but first lets wrap it up:

1. HitRSS-powered Blogs got lots of love:
     
   
   1. You can now choose between 8 beautifully-designed themes for your web blog
        
   2. You can add custom HTML to your Blog, add links, images, advertisements, whatever you wish! And you don't have to know any HTML for that as you'll be using our friendly HitRSS editor for that!
         
2. HitRSS friendly editor (WYSIWYG - What You See Is What You Get) has been updated. You can now easily add bullets, indents, etc.
     
3. You can now decide if you want your feed news to link directly to the source story, or to your web blog - it's up to you. Before that, when a user clicked on the news link, they would have to go to your web blog first... now you can decide how you want it.
       
4. HitRSS wizard has been re-designed (and there will be more re-designs coming next weeks) so it's even easier to use than ever.
      
5. Minor fixes, speed improvements, etc... to make your HitRSS experience even better.

While most of the features are of benefit for all of our users, some of them like Blog Themes and Blog custom HTML are for the PRO users only.

Upgrade to HitRSS PRO today and you'll benefit from all of these features today, you will be able to adjust your blog to fit your needs.

Upgrade today, because next week we'll be adding new features and introducing new HitRSS payment plans and only today you can take advantage of the 50% discount and get a fully-featured HitRSS account for only $97 $47 per year.

...and if you don't have a HitRSS account, sing up now for free and you'll discover how easy creating and integrating an RSS channel with your web site can be... and you will get an automatically-generated web-blog for free too - to boost your traffic even more!

Technorati tags: rss, feeds, marketing, nozbe, web-20, blogging, blogs, blog, web

As many of you have requested it - it's there! We have opened a brand new online forum for our HitRSS users and Nozbe beta testers (we are launching Nozbe beta this week). The address is:

http://forum.apivision.com

And everyone's invited!

Please share your thoughts, ideas and feedback regarding HitRSS and help us improve the RSS and Blogging experience!

I will be frequently online on the forum and would love to chat with you!

Introducing new, shorter sign up form...

OK, the old sign up form had the following fields: Account name, User's name, email address, user's city and country, time zone and "how did you hear about us?".

That's a total of 7 fields - not all that bad, but still, quite a lot. This is why I decided to simplify the process by giving the user less fields, one email message to confirm their email address and immediate login after confirmation. This is the result:

www.HitRSS.com/feed/signup

And here's the whole process step-by-step:

1. When you go to the HitRSS signup form, there are now only three fields to fill out: your name, email address and "how did you hear about us?". That's it. Just three fields:

2. After you've filled out these fields, you will see a confirmation message and an email invitation will be sent to your email address:

3. Ok, so you head on to check your email and you will see a new email message from "HitRSS User Support" with subject: "Confirm your HitRSS Account!" and this text:

4. All you have to do is just to click on this confirmation link and you will be presented with a short confirmation screen, where you will be able to choose your HitRSS account and password:

Note: creating your password is optional, so you can skip this part and HitRSS will generate a password for you. It's all up to you.

5. Done! After you've clicked on the button "confirm data and start using HitRSS" you will automacially be logged in to the HitRSS account and be able to start using it and publishing your new RSS feed and Blog!

I guess the process is easier now, there are a total of 4 obligatory fields to fill out and one clear email confirmation step. Hope this makes signing up for HitRSS easier.

Of course, if you have any problems using your HitRSS account, simply contact us via email.

For me and for all our apivision.com crew this will be a breakthrough year.

HitRSS will turn 2 (yes, that's two years!) and we have many goodies coming like:

• Full podcasting support with professional HitRSS Podcast accounts
• Even more comprehensive RSS and Blog statistics with click-through counting
• RSS and Blog directory for all of our HitRSS users
• Monthly plan for all of you who prefer to pay for PRO account month after month
• We'll be launching a new forum - apivision.com forums - for you to discuss about HitRSS, Nozbe and our other projects.
• and much much more...

We will launch Nozbe - our Getting Things Done web application for all of you who want to be even more productive and better organized in 2007! We've been using Nozbe in-house for more than a year and it's time to go public!

Nozbe will be lauched as beta later this month and the official public release is scheduled at the beginning of February 2007.

Have a great year and again, thanks for your support!

- Michael Sliwinski

Before the change, you could access this blog's RSS feed by pointing to the link:

http://www.hitrss.com/rss/hitrss.xml

OK, the address is ok and works, but looks rather looooong, don't you think? Well, we shortened it. A lot actually. The new address is:

http://feeds.hitrss.com/hitrss

And that's it. Short, sharp and simple! All of the RSS Channels (also called RSS feeds) work under one domain "FEEDS.hitrss.com", so if you want to give someone your RSS feed address, just say: feeds.hitrss.com/your_account

The same applies the your web blog's addresses. Before:

http://www.hitrss.com/blog/hitrss.html

Now: http://blogs.hitrss.com/hitrss

Again, everything is working under one common domain: BLOGS.hitrss.com

Of course, for compatibility reasons, the old addresses will continue to work as usual until the end of the world, so no worries here. Only now you have the new COOL addresses you can easily give to people while inviting them to visit your blog and read your channel.

You don't have to do anything to enable this feature. It's there working for you automatically in your HitRSS account.

This feature works on both free and PRO HitRSS accounts.

Because your visitors will enjoy your ad-free Blog and RSS. Do you want to show them ads, or your own content?

Because you can add images to your feeds and upload them easily to our servers (just read my last blog post)

Because you have full RSS statistics (with clickthrough stats coming next month!) and you want to know who's reading your news feeds.

Because you will gain more traffic - we are focusing on more traffic-boosting features every month, with even more advantages for PRO customers!

Because now it's cheaper than ever - it's less than $4 a month ($47 a year) and we are introducing a new monthly plan starting January 2007 (which will be $7 dollars monthly) so now you gain huge savings! (you save as much as $37 dollars!)

Click here to upgrade right now and save as much as 44%!

Because more goodies are coming... so remember to subscribe to this blog :-)

Again, thanks for using HitRSS and for sending us your feedback.

We want to serve as much the Free users as the PRO users... only the latter get slightly more benefits as a thank you from us for their support.

- Michael

All you have to do is to have an image ready on your computer and it can be added to your news article in seconds. We will even store your images on our servers (if you have a HitRSS PRO subscription).

OK, let's start our quick, step-by-step  "add your image" tutorial:

Step 1. Select a spot in your article where you want to put your image and click on the "Insert/Edit Image" button:

Step 2. A Dialog called "Image Properties" will pop up where you will have two options:

(1) Write an Internet address of your image, if you have it uploaded on your server. After putting your image address in place, just click OK button and you're done!

(2) Click on the "Browse server" button to choose one of your images uploaded to your HitRSS account, or upload a new image from your computer.

Step 3. Let's say we clicked on the "Browse server" button and now a new dialog showed up, wher we can either choose an image from our list of images, or click on the link to upload a new image to HitRSS.

Step 4. Let's upload a new image. It's easy:

(1) click on the "browse" button to find the image you want to upload on your computer
(2) once you've chosen the image file, click on "upload"

Step 5. Once you've uploaded your image file, it will show up on the list of images. Don't worry about the quality of the image thumbnail, it's not the actual image.

Click on the image name to select it.

Step 5. Once you've clicked on the image name, it will appear in our "Image Properties" dialog:

(1) The URL (Internet Address) of the image will be filled out for you
(2) The image sizes will also be on place
(3) You will also be able to see the image preview
(4) so all you have to do is to click OK to add the image to your news article.

Done! Your image will appear in your news article.

If you wish to edit the image later, just click on it and click on the "Edit/Insert Image" button again.

Hope you like this new feature of HitRSS.

Remember that image hosting feature is available to paying HitRSS users only. Please consider upgrading your account to support our Free service.

Thanks and till next time,

- Michael