This is an exclusive post written specifically for current MacStories subscribers. If you don’t see it showing up on our home page, don’t worry!
When we launched MacStories 3.0 on Wednesday, we had to make a few difficult decisions about what we were going to do with our RSS feeds, and the announcement came with a lot of anger. “I’ll unsubscribe!” I’d unsubscribe too to be honest, but we had something planned we couldn’t implement at the last minute…an hour before launch.
Our goal was to implement what you see here: exclusive feeds made especially for our current subscribers. In WordPress it should be pretty easy – a lot of things are. However, some of our custom code did not like the publication of this exclusive content. Mainly, we had a lot of problems working with our new featured section you see at the top of the site. We didn’t want to sacrifice some of our site essentials at launch, so we decided to grin & bear it.
These exclusive feeds enable us allow us to introduce exclusive content that nobody else but you can see. And the first thing we wanted to do with our exclusive feeds was announce a special RSS feed free from the excerpt-only BS; everyone who has been with MacStories since the beginning deserves better.
The RSS feed link you’ll find below was made exclusively for our existing subscriber base – for the few thousand of our readers who continue to dedicate a portion of their inbox to our content. For that, we’re incredibly thankful and we really gritted our teeth when we threw you under the bus with our excerpt-only announcement. Future subscribers won’t immediately have the same luxuries you’re receiving this evening.
The full MacStories experience can be had in your favorite RSS reader through the following subscriber link. We call it the MacStories VIP feed.
feed://feeds.feedburner.com/macstories/vip
Again, we had planned to introduce this on Wednesday, but due to technical difficulties, we were unable to share this particular link with just our current subscribers. This wasn’t destined to be too public, as we would like future subscribers to land on the excerpt-only feeds for the time being.
In the future, all subscribers will have a choice between an excerpt-only feed, and a full ad supported feed. We may toy with the idea of a paid subscriber list, but we think that takes it too far if we don’t provide additional exclusive content. Anyone can subscribe to the MacStories VIP if they know it exists, but we really wanted to just share this little gem with our current subscribers - you’ve been with us far too long to be subjected to ads or excerpt-only mania.
Thanks for holding on for a couple of days while our very own Alessandro Vendruscolo (@MisterJack on Twitter) worked out the bugs. We appreciate your readership, and we hope to continue rolling out additional features to MacStories that will improve and diversify the content you read everyday. Next week, we’ll be making an announcement regarding just that - diversifying and expanding our content. In the meantime, we’re huddling and planning the latest features. Please enjoy the VIP feed, and we certainly hope you enjoy the new MacStories.
