6 posts tagged “feedburner”

UPDATE: Do yourself a favor and use the newer Digg This! FeedFlare provided by FeedBurner. It's been added to the list of FeedFlares you can use right "out of the box" with no third-party monkey business.

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I’m continually honored to host the official “Digg this” FeedFlare on Feedburner’s web site, but with this great power comes responsibility. Namely, I need to keep this not broken (at a minimum) and updated (ideally). So, thanks to a heads up from a helpful guy named Joe, I am pleased to announce a small tweak to that which has garnered me such fame.

More specifically, the title of the post is now automatically populated when you submit a link. The arrival of Digg 3.0 brings with it increased capabilities in this area, as well as hope for a full API sometime soonish. Another improvement to the FeedFlare should make it behave better when you’re logged into Digg itself.

So, the update is out there now…please let me know if you have problems with it.

UPDATE: I have switched web hosts and can no longer host this Rails app in a running form. You can still download it and use it yourself.

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I got the itch to do some more coding recently, so I decided to knock out a FeedFlare I had planned on doing for a while: Printer-Friendly view, #90 on FeedBurner’s list of 101 Flares. What it does is hardly a mystery: it generates a simple, printer-friendly view of a given item in your feed. Here’s a working example.

How can I use this for myself?

If your blog is powered by Typo, the blogging engine written in Ruby on Rails, this will work for you “out of the box.” Just do the following:

1. Login to your FeedBurner account.
2. Go to the Optimize tab.
3. Click FeedFlare in the left menu.
4. Copy/paste this URL (http://rossbelmont.com/printerfriendly.xml) into the text box under Personal Flare and click Add New Flare.
5. Scroll down to the bottom and click Save. (This is easy to forget.)

If you’re using one of the other, more popular blogging engines, you’ll need to download the code and run it on your own server. I have a very run-of-the-mill shared hosting account, so attempting to keep this service up for everyone on the Internet is not a great idea. (Not that many people use Typo, so I figure I’m OK here.)

That being said, if you do plan to run the code on your own, just get in touch with me by posting a comment and I’d be happy to help you change the code to work with your blogging platform.

This doesn’t seem to work for me.

Again, this is probably because the XML format of your blog’s feed is slightly different than the format expected by the code. For example, I know that the output from WordPress has slightly different structure.

You can also try to “debug” this to some extent with your web browser. If you’re having issues, hit this URL:

http://rossbelmont.com/printerfriendly/display?↵
feedUrl=YOUR_FULL_FEED_URL_HERE&↵
itemUrl=YOUR_ITEM_PERMALINK_HERE

This provides a way to preview what your printer-friendly view will look like outside the context of FeedFlare.

How does this work?

It’s another fun little Rails app…you know, the kind I’m so fond of making? Anyway, it makes an HTTP call to pull down the feed itself, then does some XML parsing to look for the item that matches the permalink. Then, it displays the core item data in a simple web page. Done and done.

So, put another FeedFlare up on the big board. And, please leave comments if you have any.

UPDATE: I am an idiot. Here is the solution.

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Bummer.

I seem to have run into a limitation/bug in FeedBurner’s FeedFlare system: for some reason, a FeedFlare that contains an ampersand (&) is not considered valid. When I try to add one as a Personal Flare, I get this error:

We could not find a valid FeedFlare file at that location.

The FeedFlare I was creating takes two parameters—the URL of the feed as well as the URL of the individual item—hence the need for an ampersand. Here’s an example:

http://rossbelmont.com/printerfriendly/display?↵
feedUrl=http://feeds.feedburner.com/Arbited↵
&itemUrl=http://rossbelmont.com/blog/articles/↵
2006/05/10/restart-rails-on-a-shared-host

The purpose of the FeedFlare is to generate a printer-friendly view of a certain item in the feed. The FeedFlare itself has this URL in it:

http://rossbelmont.com/printerfriendly/display?↵
feedUrl=${feedUrl}&itemUrl=${link}

And again, if I take the ampersand out, it validates without any isses. But, unfortunately, if I do that I can’t have more than one parameter in the query string.

I also tried to URL encode that link to see if that would help, but that returns an error when you actually click the generated link because the ${feedUrl} and ${link} tokens are not interpreted correctly.

So, if anyone has an idea for how to get around this, I’m all ears.

UPDATE: I have switched web hosts and can no longer host this Rails app in a running form. You can still download it and use it yourself.

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I guess it is a small world after all. About two months ago I created a FeedFlare to make it easier to post your articles to digg. Wouldn’t you know it, I’m surfing the web a few days ago, minding my own business, and I see that not only is someone else actually using this FeedFlare, but posting the item to digg caused a huge traffic spike to his web site! As John ‘Hannibal’ Smith used to say, “I love it when a plan comes together.”

So, I was inspired to create another FeedFlare…number 56 on the list of 101 Flares: Feed Circulation. If you’re lucky enough to get your item on the digg home page, this is an easy way to watch your numbers go through the roof. ;)

This FeedFlare is dynamic (meaning there’s actual code that makes it work) and uses FeedBurner’s Awareness API. So, before you use it, you’ll need to enable Awareness API access to your feed.

How can I use this for myself?

It’s easy:

1. Login to your FeedBurner account.
2. Go to the Optimize tab.
3. Click FeedFlare in the left menu.
4. Copy/paste this URL (http://rossbelmont.com/feedcirculation.xml) into the text box under Personal Flare and click Add New Flare.
5. Scroll down to the bottom and click Save. (This is easy to forget.)

This doesn’t seem to work for me.

I tried to keep this pretty simple to avoid any problems, but, hey…stuff happens. To that end, I wrote this in such way that you can “debug” this a little with any web browser. If you’re having issues, hit this URL:

http://www.rossbelmont.com/feedcirculation/↵ circ?feedUrl=YOUR_FULL_FEED_URL_HERE

So, in my case, this looks like:

http://www.rossbelmont.com/feedcirculation/↵ circ?feedUrl=http://feeds.feedburner.com/Arbited

(Make sure to include the full URL.) You might see an error message like the following:

Error occured (1): Feed Not Found

The error code 1 and the message Feed Not Found are returned from FeedBurner and can be looked up on this page. They’re informative, if not exactly verbose, and they should help you pin down what went wrong.

If you see a tiny snippet of XML that tells you how many subscribers you have, you’re good to go.

How does this work?

Three words: Ruby on Rails. If you’d like to look at the code (or run it on your own server instead of mine) you can download it here.

It’s pretty straightforward, really…it grabs your feed URI from the full feedUrl and makes a call to the FeedBurner Awareness API to pull up the number of subscribers. That number is embedded in the XML the code returns, which is then parsed and displayed in your feed or on your site.

To give credit where credit is due, the code to parse the XML returned by FeedBurner was aped from the Ruby wrapper for the Backpack API, written by DHH himself.

I hope y’all like this…I’d love you get some feedback on this so please post a comment if you have any.

UPDATE: Do yourself a favor and use the newer Digg This! FeedFlare provided by FeedBurner. It's been added to the list of FeedFlares you can use right "out of the box" with no third-party monkey business.

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This one’s for all the bloggers out there.

If you have a blog, or publish any kind of information over an RSS feed, you should probably be using FeedBurner to manage your feed. In a nutshell, FeedBurner provides a boatload of free services to make dealing with your RSS feed easier.

My favorite example is something they call BrowserFriendly. As you may already know, your RSS feed itself is just an XML file. So, the “click here for my RSS feed” link you put on your blog is just a link to that file, or some mechanism that spits out that file. So, for someone who isn’t sure what RSS is, they may click that link and see a bunch of raw, ugly XML.

This happened to a friend of mine recently. (Honest to God.) He saw that I have a blog and asked me “what RSS is all about.” He said that when he clicks “the orange XML thing on these web sites, it doesn’t do anything.” FeedBurner’s BrowserFriendly feature solves this problem by showing the user a nicely styled version of the data in the XML file, along with some text explaining what subscribing to the feed is all about.

BrowserFriendly is just one (easy to understand) example. FeedBurner provides lots of other functionality as well, particularly if you’re a commercial publisher and you want to display ads in your feed. But, another fun service they provide is something called FeedFlare.

FeedFlare

FeedFlare is what provides the Email this, Subscribe to this feed, etc. links you see at the bottom of each post. Though you may be able to customize your blogging software to provide similar functionality, I think this is better because it automatically appears as part of your feed, wherever it’s being read.

In the past day or so, FeedBurner has opened up this service so that anyone can create their own FeedFlare item. They’ve also posted a list of 101 possible ideas for FeedFlare, and a call for people to create them. So, here’s my submission for #19…a little something I like to call Digg this. It’s not rocket science; just a quick little way to submit the current post to the digg.com tech news site, much in the same vein as the Add to del.icio.us links you see popping up on the web.

So, here’s hoping you take your feeds to the next level with FeedBurner, and write something cool enough to make it to the Digg home page!

I know it’s a hassle, but if all four of my readers could resubscribe to my new kick-ass Feedburner feed that would be super duper.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Arbited

Thanks.