April 04, 2006
Headline Animator now an Email-Friendly Feed Promoter
From the Quick Updates to Popular Features Dept.: Our long-standing Headline Animator service uses your feed to create a nifty graphical badge you can use to promote the last five headlines from your blog, podcast or commercial publication while promoting subscription to your content. Many publishers have told us they would like to use Headline Animator at the bottom of their HTML emails but want a graphical format that better resembles a closing "signature" block. In response, FeedBurner now offers a new style choice, complete with a dramatic new title: Email Signature Animator. (Emphasis ours!)
This version doesn't feature that stainless steel kitchen-of-the-future feel of the original, but hey, brushed metal isn't for everybody. And now when your email recipients click the new Headline Animator, they will be sent your feed, where they can quickly subscribe. Look for the new Headline Animator option under the 'Publicize' tab and start promoting your feed today.
Quick note for existing Headline Animator users: You can only have one style of Animator active per feed; it has to be set to either the Classic Headline Animator or the new Email Signature Animator style.
We know that everybody wants to see even more variability in the Headline Animator. We are hard at work on two other product lines right now, but we're going to keep cycling back to these publicity tools from time to time and expand the existing offerings.
We'll close with a sample Email Signature Animator for the Burning Questions feed:
Comments
I love this idea, but I'm having no luck making it work with my gmail account. Is there a way around this, or is gmail not friendly to javascript in sigs?
GMail doesn't seem to accept HTML or JavaScript in signature files at this point, unfortunately, so it's not an email platform in which the Email Signature Animator will work. (Yahoo Mail, however, does work well with the HTML we provide you.) Also, just to clarify, neither Animator requires JavaScript; it's plain old HTML.
We owe the publisher community a set of instructions on how to incorporate the Signature graphic into popular, compatible email applications. Coming soon!
Actually, you can get around the Gmail signature limitation by using Gmail's POP3/SMTP features.
Just use a standard email program (Outlook, Thunderbird, etc.), create a signature in that email program that has your Headline Animator in it, and send your emails through your Gmail account.
Not so much on the headline animator feature itself.. but I do love the choice of movie featured in the screenshot! :P
John,
Very clever workaround! Folks who live exclusively in their browser for GMail access are still out of luck, but this is definitely a way to get Email Sig Animator into your outbound GMail messages.
I'll make sure to mention this workaround in our forthcoming documentation set for popular email clients.
I can't seem to get this to work with Yahoo Mail--all i see when i send a test message to myself in outlook and yahoo mail is the html code itself. any help getting this to work would be appreciated!
Sean,
Quick help documentation for supported mail clients is coming; in the meantime, make sure that when you choose the "Signatures" item in Y! Mail's Options, you choose the "html" radio button displayed above the signature text area. Then, make sure you paste in the HTML code exactly as we've given it to you. When you send your first new message, the Signature Animator, not the code, should now appear at the bottom of your message.
One other note: you need to compose your message with Yahoo's "color and graphics" message composition option turned on in order for HTML signatures to work. Here is more info (and browser requirements).
If you (or anyone else) needs additional support, head on over to our Support Forums, where our staff or our publisher community will no doubt step in to offer more answers.
thanks matt. unfortunately, i have done all that and still nothing. i don't see a radio button for html for the sig, but i click on the color & graphics thing and then i copy the html in and save. then when i send myself a test message with the signature nothign shows up.
I love this feature! I really do.
Great, try to increase the user experience, since most of our subsribtion comes in from old style mailling - list.
A realy usefull option to attract readers, I use it with my Gmail account through Outlook 2003.
What about Lotus Notes? I can't seem to get it to work ...
I'm a HUGE FAN of the feed animator. It's a great way to drive traffic to my feed and share my blog with folks I email with.
really useful feature
Is there any way to localize parts of the included info though...?! Like using German instead of English...?!
i did a workaround to include the headline animator as signature in GMail.
you can find it here
http://sabrenews.blogspot.com/2007/02/howto-use-feedburner-headline-animator.html
I just posted a way to do this in Outlook 07
http://www.ebuford.com/ed_buford_just_another_ge/2007/03/outlook_07_vs_f.html
Great, try to increase the user experience, since most of our subsribtion comes in from old style mailling - list.
It worked great for me in my gmail, thanks for the tip!!
Because the images originates from another domain, most mails with the are marked as SPAM!!! They are not, of course.
Is there a way to retrieve the image from my own website. The image will have the same domain as the email-sender, so spamfilters will not mark my mails as spam anymore.
@Paul: This is actually not the case; we've run extensive tests on deliverability, measuring e-mails with Headline Animator included and without. The inclusion of Headline Animator on its own has no measurable impact on whether or not an e-mail is marked as spam - given the increasing popularity of HTML e-mail (including images in the body of e-mails) and the growth of the e-mail service provider market (who use images to track readership), we've seen no adverse impact of Headline Animator on an e-mail's likelihood of being labeled spam.
You can always use our MyBrand service, which aliases a subdomain on your side to our service. While I don't think Headline Animator on its own will create problems for you, if you're concerned about the domain of the image, MyBrand would help you address that by having the image served by your subdomain (feeds.yourdomain.com instead of feeds.feedburner.com).
Hope that helps.
I set this up in my Outlook email and love it. But several people receiving my email have told me that they now get an error message pop up when they open my emails, saying "Language pack installation.
To display language characters correctly you need to install the following language pack:
Japanese"
Has anyone else stumbled upon this problem?
To use the animator in Gmail, all you need is the "better Gmail" firefox extension. It adds a check box in your gmail account settings to enable HTML.
Of course, you'll have to use Firefox for your browser, but you should be doing that anyway...
I use it all the time. It works effortlessly. That extenstion gives you some other cool gmail stuff too.
http://lifehacker.com/software/how-to/add-an-html-signature-to-gmail-263487.php
Great feature! Unfortunately, I cannot make it work in my Mac Mail signature...any tips? Thanks!
Here are the directions for getting the code to work in Apple Mail.
Looking forward to it working in Google mail :)
