Hackathon II - Night of the Living Hack

You can't keep a good hack down ... the first FeedBurner Hackathon was so successful, we were eager to follow up with a sequel which delivers another slew of free services for the collective you, our faithful publishers. Following the same format as the inaugural event, we gathered in the FeedBurner conference room this past Thursday and started pitching projects that could be completed in one day. By 9:30, each of us had our marching orders: drop everything and complete the project by 5:00pm.

We cranked the disco tunes and got to work. We laughed, we cried, we coded. The world ceased to exist except for the hacks rapidly taking shape within each developer's workstation. When the pizza and beer arrived at the end of the day, we all piled back into the conference room to present to our peers. Below is the list of new features that are now live within the FeedBurner application. We hope you enjoy them. Nice job everybody!

PodMedic, by Jessie Chavez

A new and indispensable tool that belongs in every podcaster and videocaster's toolbox. PodMedic analyzes each of your podcast feed's episodes (aka posts or items) to identify potential issues in turning your media links into compatible podcast enclosures. It checks for the following common issues encountered with media links in podcasts: naming, availability/timeouts, and content type being returned by your hosting server. You can find this tool on your "Troubleshootize" tab.

Subscribe to your FeedBulletin via Email (powered by FeedBlitz), by Chris Frye

When things go awry with your feed, you want to be alerted in a timely manner. Now you can use FeedBlitz to receive emails alerting you to any changes in your personal FeedBulletin feed. To activate this feature, sign in to FeedBurner, go to "My Account" and select the FeedBulletin Email tab. Use your existing FeedBlitz account or create a new account right there!

Reporting Exporting, by Jon Klem

Your FeedBurner data has been empowered to break out of those pretty tables and charts and directly into your favorite spreadsheet application. The Daily Circulation Trend located on the "Analyze" tab can now be exported to Excel or CSV (comma separated value) file formats with more reports expected to follow. For a more complete solution to FeedBurner data extraction please look to the Awareness API.

Self-Help Error Messages, by Joe Kottke

Have you ever had an invalid feed with an error message along the lines of: "The prefix "o" for element "o:p" is not bound"? Seriously, who really knows what those messages mean, and why should anyone care (except us FeedBurner folks, of course)? Self-Help Error Messages translate some of these cryptic incantations into language and instructions that anyone can understand. You'll see these changes during the initial feed "burning" process as well as within FeedBulletin.

Tickerize and More Splice Options, by Eric Lunt

Do you publish a financial feed or podcast? Tickerize it! By activating the "Tickerize" service (found on the "Optimize" tab), FeedBurner will look for references to ticker symbols in your feed items and create the appropriate metadata elements per the FinancialContent specification. For a creative example of how this information can be used, check out StreetIQ.com.

The people have spoken: And they've asked for more splicing options! We've added My Web 2.0 and Digg to the list of link splicing services, and we've added Webshots as a photo splicing option. You can find these splice-worthy features on the "Optimize" tab.

FuenteClara and Excel Stats, by Steve Olechowski

Think most of your feed subscribers are Spanish speakers? Try changing your BrowserFriendly template (located on the "Optimize" tab) to "FuenteClara" which presents friendly subscription instructions in Spanish and includes links to some of the more popular aggregators with Spanish feeds, including Mi Yahoo! and Feedness.

Do you long to get statistics on ALL of your FeedBurner feeds in one place? Want to analyze your stats on your own? Now you can! Here's an example of how to do it. This spreadsheet will extract the subscriber data from your FeedBurner account and allow you to slice it, dice it, chop it, puree it, whatever. It even cuts through a tin can!

StatsTracker Konfabulator Widget, by John Zeratsky

Give your FeedBurner stats obsession a healthy boost with our StatsTracker widget for Konfabulator. Not just for the Mac anymore, this release lets you track circulation and day-to-day change for any number of feeds on both platforms. Konfabulator 2.1 for Mac OS X or Windows required.