July 01, 2005
Seven New FeedBurner Features
Inspired by a post from Joe Kraus, this past Thursday we had the first of hopefully many "Hackathon" days at FeedBurner world headquarters to celebrate the last day in our old, very cramped office. What's a hackathon you ask? Well, all of the engineers (and even some of our "business people"!) showed up in the conference room at 9:00am with ideas for projects that could be designed, implemented, and tested in a single day. We tossed around the ideas for a little while to determine which ones would be the biggest hit with our publishers and by 9:30am everyone left with their assignment: Put everything else on hold and complete their project by the end of the day.Everyone worked feverishly throughout the day while the north-siders (the bizdev and marketing teams work on the north side of the office) handled customer support (we apologize if support was less than stellar on that day!) At 5:00pm, it was demo time, with pizza and beer for the victors. I think the results are fantastic and will let each developer describe their contribution, all of which are now live and available for immediate use as described below. Comment to this post and let us know what you think of these new features and how you will use them (who knows, you could get "buzzed").
Ping Page, by Chris Frye
We now have a page that allows you to alert us that your blog has been updated and you would like FeedBurner to update your FeedBurner feed NOW (rather than during the usual 30-minute update cycle). Visit this page: http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/ping, enter your blog's url and click on the "ping" button... That's all there is to it. Hint: Bookmark the result page after hitting the "ping" button and use that bookmark as a handy way to update your blog feed from your bookmarks menu!
Geotag Your Feed, by Jon Klem
Let the world know where you Blog or Podcast from by adding your geographic position to your FeedBurner feed. Enter your latitude and longitude in the "Geotag Your Feed" service option (located in the Advanced Services section), and FeedBurner will add the appropriate geo tags (geo:longitude and geo:latitude). For U.S. publishers, just enter your Zip Code and we'll figure out the coordinates for you. Others can use mapping sites like Maporama, or Microsoft's Terraserver if you need to advertise exactly where you are.
Title/Description Burner, by Joe Kottke
Title/Description Burner allows you to change the title and/or description of your feed without changing anything in your source feed or in your blogging tool. Maybe you don't like how your feed title looks in a feed reader, maybe you want a better description for your feed, maybe you just want to call it Henry. It's your feed, after all. Title/Description Burner can help you do all of these things. Look for it in the Advanced Services section.
FeedMedic, by Eric Lunt
FeedMedic uses your Personal Feed to notify you of any errors FeedBurner encounters when regularly processing your source feed. This new service is in production right now with any new or existing FeedBurner feed. The FeedMedic reports describe the error, link to Feed Validator for additional explanation and suggestions for possible fixes, and offer one-click access to our feed Resync feature, which attempts to reset your feed. Once you locate and fix the problem, FeedMedic reports an "All Clear" message.
To view FeedMedic reports for your feeds, simply log in, go to My Account and subscribe to your personal feed.
(P.S. If you have a "Content not allowed in prolog" alert already in your feed, you can ignore it. Little launch problem that has now been fixed.)
Javascript Circulation Ticker, by Steve Olechowski
Enable your feed with the Awareness API, then put this snippet of Javascript in your blog to get a daily ticker displaying whether your circulation is going up or down.
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.feedburner.com/fb/ticker/api-ticker.jsp?uri=[your uri here]"></script>
ImageCast, by Matt Shobe
Inspired by Peter Forret's recent post on the idea of "Picture Podcasting," we've enhanced our popular SmartCast service beyond audio and video enclosures. You can now use SmartCast to create feed "enclosure" elements that point to image content (GIF/JPEG/PNG). Just check a new box in the SmartCast service setup and FeedBurner will create enclosures from certain links to image content in your postings.
Applications? RSS image screensavers, parents' "kidcasts" of a new baby's first days, and even a "5 recent pictures" plug-in that places images in a blog sidebar are some of the suggestions from Mr. Forret. We hope this feature inspires creative usage among our publishers.
StatsTracker Dashboard Widget, by John Zeratsky
Give your browser a rest and watch your feed's circulation with our new StatsTracker widget for Mac OS X Dashboard. StatsTracker shows yesterday's circulation and the one-day change in circulation for as many feeds as you care to track. We have more bells and whistles planned, so stay tuned to this weblog for upgrade announcements.
(Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" required. Download StatsTracker using Safari and it will be installed automatically. If that doesn't work, or you're using a browser other than Safari, drag the widget to /Library/Widgets inside your user folder. You'll need to know the FeedBurner URI (feeds.feedburner.com/feed URI) for any feed you want to track.
Comments
I only set-up FeedBurner today, and the new Mac OS X 10.4 widget is the icing on the cake. Sweet.
You should do this more often *shakes fist*.
Nice! I love the widget. I've got 2 for my site - they are very convienant.
For the Geotag - The easiest way to get your US or Canada based lat/long is go to Google Maps. Find yourself and then click "link to this page" the lat/long will be in the URL. It would be cool if that info was available to everyone - would make a cool POI graph on a google map to show where all the podcasters/bloggers were in the world. ;)
Wow! Great widget! My Dad is excited about picture podcasting, so he thinks that's cool, too. Now all I need is iTunes tags support and I'll be a happy podcaster. Well, I'll be happier when they list my podcast in iTunes.
~Brin
--
http://bitzofbrin.blogspot.com - Listen to my podcast!
feed://feeds.feedburner.com/BitzOfBrin - Or subscribe to it!
Thanks for your feedback, everyone!
Jeff: Thanks for the Google Maps tip. Finding one's longitude and latitude is not simple, so that's why Jon Klem built in the zip code lookup. As you suggest, there's definitely a lot of room for cool applications of this data. If a lot of people start to tag their feeds, you could show geographical groupings of feeds or look up feeds by region or city. We'll see where that goes...
There's already a pretty cool site that shows where a lot of the podcasters are locted. Maybe you could contact the webmaster and see about intigrating feedburner with it.
any chance we can get to specify iTunes 4.9 specific tags for our podcasts?
The Image cast is great, any chance of the X-cast where any extention could be used (i.e. PDF, wrf, etc). I guess the problem with this is security.
MOlly
We love the new features, the whole idea of hackathons and posted about this at techcrunch this weekend. Thank you!
the geotags didnt validate - had to remove the feature in order to get validated...can you check that out and see what's up?
thanks!
ben
Ben - we're discussing this now with the feedvalidator authors. As far as we can tell, this is a valid feed. We'll let you know when we have this resolved.
Eric
I'm experiencing some bugs that have cropped up today.
1. "No Route to House" when the file comes up in browser window
2. Description fields that are in the rdf file are not showing up in feed.
I think the problem with your geo:lat & long not validating is that you need to wrap them in a <geo:Point> tag.
<geo:Point>
<geo:lat>53.1234</geo:lat>
<geo:long>-2.1234</geo:long>
</geo:Point>
That should validate fine.
Actually, the problem was that we were generating geo:latitude and geo:longitude instead of geo:lat and geo:long. Oops. This is fixed now and your feed should validate. Sorry for the trouble!
the javascript thing appears to be broken...
http://www.feedburner.com/fb/ticker/api-ticker.jsp?uri=TheBusiness spits out a ton of Java errors :'(
For some reason, I can't get the widget to work: it loads, I type in my URI, but for some reason the stats never appear. I'm sure the URI is correct... is there anything I need to set on the feedburner side?
(The URI is AJaffeMews, if anyone wants to check...)
OK, I can answer my own question: you need to turn on the Awareness API...
Thanks so much for all these new features, as well as the iTunes support! Somehow iTunes picked up my podcast feed, but I had no idea how to change the image or the title, or if I even could. You guys made it so easy. Thanks!
However, I've found a worse problem: the widget doesn't save your feeds between invocations; it just goes back to "BurnThisRSS2,boingboing/ibag,jazeratsky"; I've figured out how to change the hardwiring, but it's not very elegant!
Hey Andrew... this is a weird thing about widgets that I plan to fix soon.
Apple's recommendation (and the standard behavior for most widgets) is that each "invocation" (each drag out of the drawer) is a separate instance with its own set of preferences.
This is how you can have several weather widgets, each with a different city, or several stickies, each with different contents. Notice, also, that when you drag these out they show you the default settings (weather shows your home city, stickies shows nothing, ours shows the three starting feeds).
The only one that doesn't behave like this is the stock widget. Since ours is very similar in nature and function to the stock widget, I plan on using that strange but appropriate behavior as well.
Thanks for pointing that out! Do you have any thoughts?
Thanks for the quick response!
I suppose the big difference (unless I've just misunderstood what's happened on my own machine!), is that when I log out and then log back in, the weather widget *keeps* the cities I've added, but the feed widget just goes back to the defaults.
Yeah, I've been having the same problem. Where did you change the "hardwiring", Andrew? I've been poking about the package contents but can't find it...
~Brin
--
http://bitzofbrin.blogspot.com - Listen to my podcast!
feed://feeds.feedburner.com/BitzOfBrin - Or subscribe to it!
I want to make the feeder available to my affiliates, which would include their affiliate link back to me....Is this possible?
Hi Feedburnies,
thanks for hacking my request for image enclosures together. I just launched my own contribution to the 'image podcasting' concept:
http://photofeed.forret.com
which allows you to look for photofeeds (Flickr, Pixagogo have thousands of them) and display them on your own website (the free 'Photoroll' service).
Go check it out!
Also see my blog post about it on
http://blog.forret.com/blog/2005/08/photofeed-image-podcasting.html
Just wanted to let you know that there is a new version of the widget available for download. I've fixed the bug affecting preferences, at last!
http://www.feedburner.com/fb/products/StatsTracker.wdgt.zip
Is this Feedburner Stats widget still working? I can't get it to show any feed details, default or otherwise.
Umm, so why is the widget only for Mac OS? Arent the majority of us on PC's??
@ Andrew,
Useful, Can you post your API?
