Some recent updates to Feed Control...

Our new standard template now includes the featured image for each item. It's the default template for new feeds with feed generation enabled.

Plus plan users can now choose the SmartNews RSS template, for publishing on the SmartNews news platform. Business plan users can choose SmartNews, Flipboard or MSN News.

If you've enabled feed generation, you can now set the the number of items you'd like the feed to have. The default is 10. On the Plus plan you can increase this to 20. And on the Business plan to 50.

When you go to add a new feed, you'll now see that you can enter a Google News URL. That can be a topic, or a news search. See our blog post to get an idea of what kind of Google News feeds you can produce.

Feed Controll now tries a number of times to retrieve the full-text content for feed items (when full-text fetching is enabled). When full-text extraction fails, you'll see 'failed' in red in your item listing view. Failed items do not get added to the output feed.

The most common reason for a failed extraction is that the site either has its content marked up in a way that requires custom rules in Feed Control's extractor, or it's refusing Feed Control's requests for the content. If you'd like us to investigate failing extraction, please get in touch.

Feed Control will soon let you to choose a feed template when generating RSS feeds from your content. And podcast creation will be supported too.

Read more in our blog post.

We've now added a new feed output option: .

To enable this:

Next time your feed updates, images will be removed from the generated feed's item content. You can choose the 'Rebuild feed' action from the feed's actions menu to have the feed rebuilt with the new setting applied (although you might have to wait a minute or two for the generated feed to update).

New feature for and plans: You can now enable curation mode on your feeds.

Curation mode is intended for users who have set up feed generation in Feed Control. When enabled, Feed Control will still monitor the source feed, but you will have to pick the items that should be included in the feed output.

In this mode items that Feed Control processes will be marked as candidates and not automatically included in the feed output.

This is useful if you want to be very selective about the feed items that should be processed by any system consuming your feed. If filtering rules have been set up, items that fail to pass the filters will be marked as 'filtered', making it easier for you to decide which items to consider for inclusion.

You can enable curation mode by editing a feed and going into the filters tab:

Whether you enable curation mode or not, you can now also change the visibility of feed items that Feed Control has retrieved to hide specific items from output.

When you change item visibility you have the following options:

As part of this update, we now show you filtered items in the item list, whereas before they were hidden. Using the new funnel button you can change the view to show only items which are visible, filtered, or manually hidden. We hope this makes it a little easier to work with your feeds.

When you change the filtering rules for a feed, the updated filters only affect new feed items that Feed Control processes. To apply the new filtering rules to existing items, we've added a new feed action: Re-filter feed items.

Previously you were able to delete all feed items belonging to a feed, but not individual feed items. We now let you selectively delete feed items.

Note: Deleting feed items removes them from the Feed Control database, but if they're still in the source feed, they will be added again when the feed is refreshed. This is useful if you want Feed Control to re-process the feed item, e.g. if you've enabled full-text fetching for the feed. To exclude the item from appearing in the feed output, you should change the item's visibility to hidden instead (see item visibility section above).

Finally, some of you wrote in to tell us that you'd experienced issues after we rolled out the previous update. This incuded some items being marked as 'failed' as well as filtering issues. We apologise if your feeds were affected, and have now now fixed the issues that were reported to us. If you still encounter any trouble, please do let us know.

For users who have enabled full-text fetching of article content, Feed Control now handles these item by item. This means that we now add new items and then fetch and expand each item with the full content. This means that for full-text feeds we will now fetch up to 15 new items each time we check the source feed (determined by the update frequency you have set for your feed). Previously, when full-text fetching was enabled, we only retrieved up to 5 items at a time.

When a feed item is still being processed, you will see this indicated in the feed items view now under the status column:

If you notice any issues, please feel free to get in touch with us. We're always happy to hear feedback, whether that's ideas for improving the service, or issues you've encountered processing your feeds in Feed Control.

When you generate RSS feeds through Feed Control, you can now add HTML to be appended to the end of the content in each feed item entry.

To do this:

To have the item URL inserted in the HTML, use the placeholder. For example:

We recently added Integrations to Feed Control. You'll find a new link in the left-hand menu where you can access Integrations.

You can now connect your Slack workspace or Discord server to Feed Control.

Once you do, you'll be able to tell Feed Control to post new updates to your feeds or bundles to a specified channel.

You can connect multiple Slack workspaces or Discord servers in Feed Control. And for each feed or bundle, you can specify multiple channels that updates should be posted to.

We've had support for webhooks before, but users have been limited to a single webhook URL per account.

Now webhooks are part of our integrations, so you can register multiple webhook URLs. Each feed or bundle can then be linked to one or more of these Webhook URLs.

We'd love to hear what you think about these changes. If you experience any difficulty or just have general comments, please do let us know!

It's now possible to sign up or login to Feed Control with just a few clicks, using your existing Google account.

In Feed Control, you can now group one or more feeds into a bundle and have RSS or JSON generated for the bundle.