:: Frequently Asked Questions ::

Here are some of the common questions that we have seen that may help you with understanding BlastCasta. If you have a question that you do not see here, please contact us directly at info@blastcasta.com.

• Do I need to have my own feeds to use BlastCasta?
  No, having your own feed is not necessary. You can use our system to load news from other feed sources as well as link other feeds to our system as news sources for other publishers to use on their websites.


• Can I purchase your feed-processing system?
  We only offer online services at this time and our service is extremely fast and reliable.


• I have some suggestions, would you seriously consider implementing them on your site?
  Because we're an agile company, if we decide that your suggestion(s) would benefit BlastCasta users, we would most likely schedule them to be implemented in our system as quickly as possible.


• Am I allowed to pull in news items from any feed and use them on my website?
  It depends on the copyright or terms of use agreement of the feed publisher or if the publisher grants you reuse permission. In general, many allow use of feeds as content since only a summary of each item is given and a link back to the publisher's site is generally part of the item. However, some publishers may take issue and you should always make sure you have permission to reuse a feed.


• Why do you offer so many of your services for free?
  We offer our services for free because we generally display advertisements on the page alongside the service to cover our costs.


• I am a publisher and would prefer people to not use my feeds through your service. What can I do?
  Since our service is medium and is open to everyone, similar to the web, when for example, someone references a copyrighted image from another site onto their own, we cannot stop this. You may try to convince the violator or even pursue legal action against the violator to cease such usage.


• Do podcast feeds work with your service?
  Yes. The beauty is in the standard XML file format in which all feeds are formatted. This means that almost any feed can be picked up and handled by our service.


• Will updates to your service break any of your scripts that I am using?
  No, because we plan to maintain backwards compatibility as we move forward. This means that any script you embed in your site will continue to work, provided that the feed's publisher leaves the feed intact. We realize that backwards compatibility is important as our scripts will be all over the web and cannot be changed on our whim.


• Can I track hits to my feed or clicks of different news feed items?
  Although this is quite possible using JavaScript and other DHTML techniques, we won't have specific help on this until we complete our online help system and forum.


• What is the maximum number of news feed scripts that I can create with BlastCasta?
  You can create as many news feed scripts as you'd like.


• How would I use the news feed script?
  You simply need to paste this script in the place you want it to appear on your website.
  
  If you use the DIV version, the news items would render directly in your page, whereas if you use the IFRAME version, news items will be displayed within an IFRAME window in your page.
  
  Trial and error is the best way to get it right: just change the script's placement or the page's HTML until you are satisfied.


• I want to include your scripts on an SSL secured page, but I get the warning for mixed secure and unsecure files. How can I stop this warning message?
  Since our site does have a SSL certificate associated with it, simply change the URLs pointing to our site to contain https instead of http. (NOTE: Be careful not to change any of the URLs pointing to the feeds that are in the scripts.)