FeedFlare’s non-RSS Support is Limited
Apr 11th, 2006 by Alex
FeedBurner offers a service called FeedFlare, which enables blog publishers to provide pre-populated links to other sites such as del.icio.us or digg. This works just fine, but only if your articles are contained within your RSS feed.
When I read Paul Burd’s article on FeedFlare, I was impressed. The graph of his increased visitors is really something, so I tried it out. At first, I liked it… then I decided that it wasn’t for me. There are a few major limiting factors of FeedFlare which make it unsuitable for my blogs.
The Javascript Source Is Elsewhere
To use FeedFlare you have to embed a small chuck of Javascript on your page, which is loaded from FeedBurner’s server(s) when your page loads. This means that you have no control over the content of the script being loaded.
The script is currently completely beneign. While I don’t think the FeedBurner folks are out to get me or anyone else, the content of that script could change at any time. This worries me, especially since a change could alter how my page renders or expose my visitors to a cross-site scripting attack. That’s the worst case, but it is possible.
There is also the speed aspect. I like blogs to be responsive; I try not to clutter my blogs with a lot of images or other items that have to be loaded from a server that is not local to mine. If a remote server is overloaded or otherwise bogged down, it affects people’s impression of my blog. My visitors may not know that I contract some services out, but they do know when my pages are loading slowly and that reflects poorly on me. While I haven’t experienced poor load times yet, I know loading from my own server is faster.
Lack of Output Control
FeedFlare’s output is a few document.write lines, all properly within SPAN tags so that you can alter the appearance of the output using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)). Except that everything falls within a paragraph tag… which the documentation clearly states that I can also alter using CSS. I know this, but that just doesn’t work for me; I don’t use paragraph tags for one, and I want to intersperse the links within my existing site (not in a seperate paragraph).
Lack of Support for non-RSS Articles
This is a big one. When I updated my templates, I didn’t see the new links on some of my older entries. As far as I can tell, the Javascript must pull an entry’s title and URL from the RSS feed itself. While this is probably quick for FeedBurner to process, it doesn’t help all of the articles that aren’t contained within my RSS feed.
How I Manage
As convenient as FeedFlare is, I don’t need it. You may not, either. The links that it creates aren’t hard to create yourself; a little more work than a few clicks, but more easily customized for your site.
If you use Movable Type, you don’t need FeedFlare to pull your article titles and URLs from the RSS feed. MT’s variables are available to you, specifically the MTEntryPermalink and MTEntryTitle variables. All you have to do is add a few lines to your Individual Entry Template (and if you don’t have Movable Type, I’m sure there’s a similar way to do this with your particular blogging software).
For example, linking to del.icio.us:
<a href="http://del.icio.us/post?url=<$MTEntryPermalink$>&title=<$MTEntryTitle$>">Add to del.icio.us</a>
Another another, linking to digg:
<a href="http://www.digg.com/submit?phase=2&url=<$MTEntryPermalink$>">Digg this</a>
That’s all there is to it. All the other variables you may need are in the MT Help section, within your installation.
![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif){kind=small}