DealBase Now With RSS Feeds For Hotel Deals

I've been extremely busy with DealBase work, so have lagged on blogging, but have some interesting things coming up and hope to post more soon. Recently I added RSS feeds to all of the city/destination and hotel pages on DealBase. This is just one more way for you to keep up to date with all the deals we add to the system. Our other primary way, aside from browsing the site of course, is to sign up for personalized alert emails. This lets you follow one or more cities, and set criteria like class of hotel (i.e. you only want to see 4 and 5 star hotels), maximum price, and so on. You can set a schedule for how often you want the emails (once a week, twice a week, daily, etc.). We'll send you up to the best 10 deals that match your criteria. You can also simply subscribe by just supplying your email address and nothing else and we'll set your initial preferences for our top 10 destinations. We'll continue to enhance this alert service, and I'd love to hear any suggestions people have for additions, changes, etc.

Development of the alert emails has been interesting. One of the most useful tools throughout has been Litmus' email testing service. It's pretty slick. They cover quite an array of email clients, both web hosted (Gmail, Yahoo, Hotmail, etc.), as well as desktop (Outlook, Apple Mail, Notes, etc.). They also do spam testing. When you begin a test, they supply you an email address specific for that particular test run, and then you just email them the real email you want tested. You can also paste in an email, but I prefer to do the sending approach to as closely mimic the real thing as possible. I have my IRB and various other bits configured to make it a single command to fire off test cases to a Litmus supplied email address, and the whole process works great, and is truly worth Litmus' cost.

I started off mentioning RSS, and back to that... The RSS does work differently than the email alerts (obviously), and to some degree the web page. It is like selecting the "Most Recently Posted" sort on a page (see below image). Deals are supplied to the RSS feed as they're posted, just like a blog would do. Just one more way to stay on top of deals. Oh, and don't forget we're on Twitter too.

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