FeedFlare - the debate to use it or not
Related entries in Blog software & toolsYesterday Feedburner came out with FeedFlare. And, you bet I wanted to jump all over that. Such a great idea for building more interactivity into your posts.
FeedFlare is initially launching today with seven simple options, including:
* most popular tags for this item via del.icio.us
* tag this item at del.icio.us
* Technorati cosmos: number of links to this post
* Creative Commons license for this specific item. This works even if you are splicing, say, a Flickr photo feed into a blog feed and the two parent feeds have different licenses associated with them.
* number of comments on this post (currently only for feeds created by Wordpress)
* email this item
* email the author of this item (particularly helpful if the item ends up spliced into another feed or repurposed on a site).
Plus, the API for FeedFlare will soon be open, meaning many more things will soon be possible such as integrated tags and more. It’s very exciting news.
Well, I immediately activated in on Blogaholics. Then walked away. Not too long later I was alerted that it was not reading right everywhere.
Here’s the deal: we use Atom for our feeds and there is a slight difference to the feed with FeedFlare on than with it off. Now, both are valid ways to display the XML information, but one way, the way used when FeedFlare is on, does not get displayed properly in all readers or search engines. It’s technical, and I’m not a technical person, but that’s the best I can explain it.
Yes, even over at Alexa, where you’d think it would be ok. So, I am torn. To use it means gaining interactivity, but potentially losing search traffic or more, depending on where else it may not be supported yet.
So, for right now it’s off again until I can make up my mind on this matter. Which do you think is more important? Supporting current traffic or potential new traffic?
December 14th, 2005 at 2:31 pm
Hi there Arieanna! Would you mind emailing me the details? I’d like to investigate … if it’s affecting you, it’s probably affecting others.
Thanks!
Eric Lunt
CTO, FeedBurner
December 14th, 2005 at 3:16 pm
Hi Eric,
When FeedFlare is off the post content is wrapped in < ![CDATA[ ]] but when FeedFlare is on the CDATA is gone and the HTML is escaped(i.e. <p>). Alexa and some RSS readers display this verbatim instead of unescaping it.
From what I understand by reading the Atom spec, when the type attribute of the atom:content element has the value “html” then it is clear that the content is escaped HTML and if you want to display it as intended then it must be unescaped.
The atom feed I see from Feedburner uses type attributes with the value “text/html”. What is not necessarily clear is that content of type “text/html” should probably be processed like content of type “html”. Could this be what is confusing some Atom processors?