Feed metrics are being rebuilt and the current circulation counts are good as of midnight eastern last night. We’re working on reach now.

Things are pretty settled now on serving; if you have any issues with your FeedBlitz feed, please check / update its settings, and then email support if there’s a problem you can’t resolve.

The circulation counts of zero do NOT mean you’ve lost your subscribers! They’re still getting the updates.

What it means is simply this: The RSS service’s log analysis and reporting engine hasn’t been started yet, since we’ve been focusing on getting your word out to your readers first.

We’ll be moving on to restarting the analytics tomorrow, but meanwhile, don’t freak out ! If you can see your feed, so you can your readers. There’s nothing for you to do about this – it’s entirely our issue to resolve here.

So to recap: Subscribers are getting the updates, FeedBlitz just has’t gotten around to updating the circulations yet.

While recreating feeds yesterday after the server meltdown we had to take them out of the UI while we worked. Feeds are now back in the UI and can now be configured.  All the feeds have been flagged as “Setup Needed” so when you visit the site dashboard you should click through on the setup button and verify / update settings.

We recreated feeds and used default settings for things like comments, social sharing and related posts. If you had changed those settings before, you can now do so again from the UI.

If you had used splices (third party feeds) to augment your basic blog’s feed, it was not possible to recreate them as we  rebuilt the system. They will need to be re-added via the UI to your feed.

If your current feed isn’t working right, work your way through the setup from teh site dashboard. If you can’t find your feed in the UI, or you’ve set it up and it still doesn’t seem happy, please contact support@feedblitz.com. If you were using the FeedSmart add in for your blog and had temporarily disabled it, you should re-enable it after you check your feed’s configuration in the FeedBlitz UI.

We’ll post a couple more updates through the day; and thank you all for your patience.

RSS feeds are now posting updates; mailings are of course running 100%. We’ve set social media flares, inline comment updates and related articles to the defaults for now. Next update tomorrow morning as we finish up.

Feeds are now being served and links active for current feeds as they were at 5pm last night, US eastern. They are not yet being updated; this task is on deck next.

We have had a serious hardware problem on a core element of the FeedBlitz RSS (not email) service. It’s pretty bad news: That gear isn’t recoverable, per the hosting service we’re using. So the RSS side of the house is effectively down at the moment. I know apologies aren’t enough, but FWIW, we’re sorry.

Unfortunately, it may take us days to recover full operational capability for RSS feed serving. We can’t get to the daily backups on the RSS front that would simplify this process and were there for that express purpose. With hindsight we could – and should – have handled our daily backups differently (the email service does this much better), and we’ll get that right as we get your feeds back up and running (which we can and will do – it just won’t be easy). We just didn’t envision this kind of badness happening.

For now, we’re focusing on getting your feeds back to being served as job #1.  Everything else is secondary.

For emailers, if you want to temporarily switch to using your blog’s raw feed for your mailings, pick your list(s) from your FeedBlitz site navigation, click the settings button, and update the article source URL. If you’re using the FeedBlitz FeedSmart plugin you should temporarily disable that.  Mailings are working fine provided that they don’t use a FeedBlitz RSS feed source. And yes, I’m very much aware of the irony.

I’ll post updates here on the blog as we progress.

We’re working the issue with our host and will post updates here and on Twitter (via @phollows) with any updates. Thank you for your patience and sorry for any inconvenience this may cause you.

Along with our partners, LiveIntent, last week we at FeedBlitz won a 2011 Digital Publishing Award from digital media, marketing and advertising firm Digiday. We’re excited and grateful to Digiday for the honor, and to our team LiveIntent, a partner and platform it is a pleasure to work with.

17 winners were announced at the Digiday Gala Dinner in New York last week, and the company we kept was like a who’s who of the online social media, marketing and advertising worlds. Winners included BlogHer, BuzzFeed and AOL amongst others.

Now at this point, I know, your eyes are glazing over, just a little. An award is alway fun for us to get but for you, Dear Reader, it begs a simple question: “So What?”

The “So What” for FeedBlitz publishers is this. Remember that an award is a trailing indicator. Awards honor work and progress that has already been finished and proven in the real world. As it happens, we have been continuing to work with LiveIntent, our co-winners. What we’re working on is the next step: Bringing this award-winning (sorry, couldn’t resist!) solution to premium FeedBlitz publishers as an income generator for you later this year. Watch this space!

Wouldn’t you love a set it and forget it newsletter? Professional, working for you, without your having to create it from scratch each and every time?

Earlier this year I sat down – virtually, of course! – with David Perdew for a webcast for him and his community of internet marketers, known as NAMS.  Click here to watch the video of the webcast to find out how FeedBlitz is different – and more than – your everyday email service.

You can also grab the slides (and other presentations I’ve given) from my SlideShare channel at http://www.slideshare.net/phollows:

In helping to get your word out to your audience, pretty much nothing works better than enabling your readers to share via their social networks. FeedBlitz’s RSS service has done that for years now, but emails we sent out only included those options if the email was powered by a FeedBlitz RSS feed, aside from a Facebook “Like” button option. Even for FeedBlitz RSS -powered emails, if you wanted to change what social options the email offfered, you had to go to the RSS settings page to change it. It was possible, yes, but not that simple to do.

No more. To both issues!

1) No matter whether or not your emails are powered by FeedBlitz, FeedBurner, or your blog’s native feed, you now have access to all our social sharing options from the mailing list itself:

2) If you previously had the Facebook like button enabled for your mailings, from today onwards you will also have the options to share on Google+, LinkedIn, Twitter and Pinterest enabled by default.

3) We’ve simplified sharing on Google+ so that’s a much more direct and user friendly experience.

To enable or change the social sharing and bookmarking options in your emails, log in to FeedBlitz, select your list from the navigation, click the settings button, and then the social sharing link in the “Per-Post Modifications and Email Formatting” section.