DotNetKicks Flare for FeedBurner and DasBlog
A number of folks have asked about the "flare" on my site that appears at the bottom of each post. This is possible via a number of things.
First, the current version of DasBlog (get it via SubVersion) supports FeedBurner directly. FeedBurner will host your RSS Feed for you and DasBlog will automatically redirect folks who ask for your original feed to the new FeedBurner one, like http://feeds.feedburner.com/ScottHanselman. This will allow you to manipulate your feed in a number of new ways, including the addition of "feed flare."
Gavin Joyce kindly created a FeedFlare for DotNetKicks.com that I put up at http://www.hanselman.com/blog/kickitflare.xml. I told FeedBurner, via their web-based configuration interface to use this new flare and it now appears automatically at the bottom of each of my posts along with a few other bits of flare.
Then I added this line to my itemtemplate.blogtemplate file in my DasBlog specific theme folder:
<script src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/ScottHanselman?flareitem=<%PermalinkUrlRaw%>" type="text/javascript"></script>
This includes a bit of JavaScript from FeedBurner that creates the flare. I can have different flare in the feed and the site.
NOTE: Apparently there's some kind of known bug in FeedBurner on their side related to DasBlog's correct usage of the Description element in the RSS Feed, but they know about it and they are working on it. This causes, it seems, flare to not display in some aggregators.
I've been VERY happy with FeedBurner and it's cut my bandwidth in half and added a host of new abilities like more detailed statistics on the number of subscribers, where they're from and what aggregator they use.
So, the combination of DasBlog's auto-redirect, the FeedFlare API, modifying the DasBlog item template and their FeedFlare JavaScript make it so.
About Scott
Scott Hanselman is a former professor, former Chief Architect in finance, now speaker, consultant, father, diabetic, and Microsoft employee. He is a failed stand-up comic, a cornrower, and a book author.
About Newsletter
Jon Galloway
Is it possible to stop dasBlog from passing out non-obfuscated email addresses into the feed?
Of course, we still have the problem that FeedBurner themselves leak one's signup email address into the Feed (and blame dasBlog for it despite assurances that the particular email address was never added to the dasBlog configuration in the first place).
For those who are uninitiated - using Feedburner at this time will get your email addresses harvested and published on Google.
Koon - phooey on you, there's 3 toolbars there, Google, WebDev and Delicious. :P
Paul - News to me...tell me what the bug is and I'll fix it.
http://www.dotnetkicks.com/tags/ScottHanselman
How about moving dasBlog to using Team System (CodePlex) ?
I'm willing to help in making such a move...
Regards,
Eran Kampf
Comments are closed.