I woke up this morning and realized that I’ve been letting myself lose sight of my original software development goals. Feedlinx has been a primary focus for me for the past few months, and I’ve been adding features like crazy, but I realized that Feedlinx is just an interface. It has a lot of useful features, but it’s sort of like the body of a Camaro. It’s the thing you see — the part that draws you in — only because it’s sometimes hard to visualize the real attraction under the hood.

Last year I built a set of web services and packaged it into a feed server. The product is called ZipLine. ZipLine has a user interface. It could use some work, but it’s functional. However, the GUI is not really a focus of the Zipline product. It’s all about web services.

Most of the features of Feedlinx are completely being driven by the ZipLine web services. Feedlinx is the body on top of a powerful engine. ZipLine supports internal, external, and feedmail feeds. All of the email functionality and special processing is part of the ZipLine product.

ZipLine was built to deliver individualized feeds. As the name suggests, it’s a direct connection between a feed and a person. This could be an extremely powerful addition to a site with a built-in set of users. A publisher could utilize an existing user list to provide targeted feeds to its members. Additionally, ZipLine supports in-post feed advertising (I may have even published this part before Google’s AdSense for Feeds). A publisher would be able to utilize ZipLine to provide contextual advertising based on the subscriptions that the user may already have with a particular site. Again, this is powerful stuff, and very simple to implement through ZipLine’s web service architecture.

So, while I’ve been building more features into ZipLine over the past few months, I have not been promoting it. The current version that is available for download is a much earlier rev. It’s time to get back on track and promote ZipLine again. I think it has a lot to offer other providers and can provide an instant advantage through the power of individualized web feeds.

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