Dancing About Architecture

Today we announced the second phase of FeedFlare, which allows you to put the FeedFlare back on your site. To see an example, I've added it to this blog ... just look right below this item. The "Add to del.icio.us" and "View CC license" are generated by FeedFlare. They showed up because I put the following code (as directed by our help guides) in my Movable Type template:

<script src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/eric?flareitem= <$MTEntryPermalink$>" type="text/javascript"></script>

Now, if you're an MT junkie, you might not be that impressed ... "you could have just added the Flare things directly to your template". That's true. But for the majority of the users, what's really cool about this is that, once you've put that single Javascript call, you configure all of the settings from the FeedBurner UI. No messing with plug-ins, no rebuilding your site, no having to move to dynamic templates. And it's universal: you use the same interface to configure an MT blog as you do for a Blogger blog as you do for a WordPress blog. Once we release the third phase of FeedFlare, where we open up the API so anyone can create these FeedFlare, we'll really see the flexibility of this universal plug-in framework.

There's one other very powerful thing about FeedFlare on the site: we are using all of the metadata and expressive power of the feed to inform the FeedFlare on the site. Since FeedBurner is processing your feed, all of the structured information is available to help generate the FeedFlare on the site. No having to scrape an HTML page like other scripts are forced to do -- we can use the upstream information that simply isn't available in the final, rendered page.

I'm really excited about this new development with FeedFlare, but I'm really really excited about what's coming next. The API is going to be a lot of fun, and I can't wait to see the kinds of FeedFlares that will be created. So, back to work for me!