FeedFlare: Add Interactivity in your Feeds
By Pankaj May 17, 2007 filed in Internet Marketing, Blogging Tips
A very simple but effective way to introduce interactivity in your feeds is by enabling FeedFlare provided by FeedBurner. All you have to do is to register yourself at FeedBurner.com and enable the FeedFlare available in the ‘Optimize’ tab. If you are not sure whether you should burn your feeds or not, read my previous post: Do I need to use FeedBurner? Does it help? . Back to this post, FeedFlare adds a simple footer in your RSS feed which could include variety of links and information. Among the many flares, few of them (popular ones as per me) are described below…
Email This - Allows subscriber to email the current item to anyone using a web-based email form provided by FeedBurner.
Email the Author - Allows subscribers to email the author directly that is to you using a web based form provided by FeedBurner. If you haven’t mentioned your email id in your feed details then ‘Email the Author’ link is not displayed.
Comments Count - This flare works only if you have self hosted WordPress blog or have some other system which uses wfw:comments element in the feed. This flare shows the number of comments posted to this particular item.
Save to del.icio.us - Shows the number of saves and the top tags for the item at del.icio.us and allows readers to save the item at del.icio.us.
Digg This! - Displays the number of Diggs and comments for the item at digg.com and allows readers to digg the story.
Discuss on Newsvine - Publishes a link to this story on Newsvine and creates a conversation.
Stumble It! - Submit to StumbleUpon, with dynamic count of number of reviews.
Technorati Cosmos Links - Displays the number of links to your item from blogs, as measured by Technorati. (If there are no links, this Flare will not appear.)
View Creative Commons License - - Displays the Creative Commons license that you may have applied to your feed (or to individual content items).
Scape This - A FeedFlare for Netscape.com.
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Digg This!
Technorati
Del.icio.us
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Yahoo! My WebHow does an RSS Feed help ?
By Arnab March 20, 2007 filed in Miscellaneous, Internet Marketing
RSS came into existence after a long line of similar formats that were used for syndication. However, none of them became as popular as this because of one drawback – a majority of these formats were only programmed to work with a single service. These early versions were born from ‘push’ and ‘pull’ technologies; Backweb and Poincast are two examples of this category.
The first version of RSS was RDF Site Summary that was produced in the year 1999 by Dan Libby from Netscape. This became fairly popular and was named as RSS 0.9 from the various suggestions and comments by the users. Libby then formed a format that was based on the similar model and called it RSS 0.91. Unfortunately, RSS and XML were both left off by Netscape without any owner just at the time when it was gaining popularity. To save this, a working group and mailing list, RSS DEV was set up by the various patrons to allow XML to continue its development. After a variety of modifications, in November 2005, Microsoft proposed to rename its Simple Sharing Extensions to RSS. One month later, Microsoft and Outlook both came forward to announce that in their blogs they would be using the ‘feed icon’ that was first used in Mozilla Firefox browser. This picture was used as an industry standard for both RSS and related formats like Atom.
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So what are Feeds, RSS, Atom, Feed Readers?
By Pankaj November 24, 2006 filed in Blogging Tips
This is one question I have been asked many times in the past from various people I know.
Lets understand the problem first. I as Internet user, read lot of information published or updated on various websites and weblogs (commonly known as blogs). As a simple example, a news site like CNN publish news everyday and there are so many blogs I am interested in reading which are updated regularly. Now if I have to read the fresh content on a daily basis i would need to personally visit each site/blog (say around 15/20) and check if there is fresh content in these forums and then read them, whew! it would become a virtually impossible task for me . This is where feeds comes in handy and solves my problem. Read More »