August 17th, 2004

Filed under:
About This Site
5 Comments »

Boring Site Note: I’m Trying FeedBurner

In an effort to actually determine how many people subscribe to this site via RSS, I’m trying FeedBurner. FeedBurner enables you to see more stats about your RSS feed than most Web stats engines provide. I’ve set up redirects from my existing RSS feed, so current RSS users shouldn’t have to do anything. Everything looks copacetic (I looked that word up to make sure I spelled it correctly, and look what I found), but if you are experiencing problems, please report them in the comments.

If you want to subscribe to the feed directly, it is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Darrenbarefoot.

If you don’t know what RSS is, or why it’s good, now is an excellent time to try it out. This appears to be a decent, non-techie introduction. As the article describes, the first thing you’ll need is an RSS reader. I use Bloglines, but have also tried and approve of NewsNetWire, SharpReader (requires the .Net framework, so heads up) and this Mozilla plugin.

UPDATE: David Janes writes to recommend BlogMatrix Jäger (is that umlaut going to break my RSS feed?). I tried it out, and it’s pretty nifty, but I really like Web-based aggregators like Bloglines, because I can access them from any computer, any time.

Comments: 5 Responses so far

jo
August 17th, 2004
9:44 pm

Thanks, I’ve always wondered about the origins of the word copacetic. The first time I really heard it was through Gill Scott-Heron and have always wondered about the African American connection (also because of the context of subsequent encounters with the word).

Never thought to look it up that way though, I tend to rely on my Webster’s when it comes to language.

[Reply]

Anonymous
August 17th, 2004
10:32 pm

I’m using Thunderbird, which supports RSS as of some recent nightly builds… very stable, very easy to use.

In Thunderbird, there is a header on RSS feeds (don’t know if everyone else sees it, but it’s there in Thunderbird) called “Website:”, that has a link to the location of the original article.

Normally, this link looks the way it would look in a browser, like
http://www.darrenbarefoot.com/archives/001035.html

Since you’ve started with feedburner, it links through their site, like
http://feeds.feedburner.com/Darrenbarefoot?m=3

The link takes me to the same place.

Thought you would like to know. Not quite as clean, yes?

Len

[Reply]

Darren
August 17th, 2004
10:57 pm

Len: Thanks for that. If I understand you correctly, the functionality is the same, you’re just seeing a different link?

[Reply]

Anonymous
August 18th, 2004
12:33 am

Darren:

Yup, Feedburner has a redirect in place - you’ll see if you copy and paste the URL into your address bar.

Having brought it up, it seems like a fussy little detail now, little to pay for the added functionality of Feedburner.

Len

Len

[Reply]

Simon Fodden
August 18th, 2004
9:14 am

Hi Darren

Whatever you’ve just done has caused NetNewsWire to regard your last dozen or so posts as “new” or edited.

Cheers,

Simon

[Reply]

Add a comment