Yesterday afternoon, I sat down with the goal of creating my first FeedBurner FeedFlare.  I wasn’t sure just how hard it would be, so I was ready for a grind.  As it turns out, creating a working FeedFlare was not that difficult.

The FeedFlare

Before I get too deep, if you have a err.. burning desire to use my feedflare, it can be found here:

http://www.scribkin.com/viewable/yacktrack.xml

With a bit of luck however, you will soon see an announcement by Rob, the creator of YackTrack, with the new permanent location of this feedflare with instructions.  It will probably show up here:

http://www.yacktrack.com/tools

So, feel free to use mine if you must, but switch to the new one once it is up.

Background

A little history first.  I already use several FeedFlares on my site, I’m sure you have seen them:

I have been able to work the style sheet to get these included nicely on my site.  However, the YackTrack widget that already exists just was a bit clunky for me, for a few reasons:

• I couldn’t easily put the widget in my RSS feed.
• The widget is a combination of an icon and text, and I couldn’t get the text to vertically align nicely with the icon.  This was solved by keeping just the icon and dumping the rest.
• The javascript is written in a way to grab the name of the article from the titlebar.  This means that it would only work with WordPress on single pages, not on the front page (the big loop).

I did manage to get the widget incorporated on my site.  If you are looking at this article with comments, you will see the icon in the upper-right-hand corner next to the print view.

Still, I decided the FeedFlare was needed to kill three birds with one.. err.. flare.

Ok, so how did I make a FeedFlare?

First, I started by turning to the FeedFlare Developer Guide, now hosted by Google Code.  This page had a really nice step-by-step tutorial. However, I never really got past step 2.  Why?  Well, here is the step two example:

   1: <FeedFlareUnit>

   2:     <Catalog>

   3:         <Title>See Related Pages at Google</Title>

   4:         <Description>A static FeedFlare unit that links to a Google page that shows

   5:         pages that are similar to the current item</Description>

   6:     </Catalog>

   7:     <FeedFlare>

   8:         <Text>Hello, see related pages</Text>

   9:         <Link href="http://www.google.com/search?as_rq=${link}"/>

  10:     </FeedFlare>

  11: </FeedFlareUnit>

And now, here is my code:

   1: <FeedFlareUnit>

   2:     <Catalog>

   3:         <Title>Track This at YackTrack!</Title>

   4:             <Description>This FeedFlare will take the current URL and submit it to the YackTrack search engine.</Description>

   5:         </Catalog>

   6:         <FeedFlare>

   7:             <Text>YackTrack This!</Text>

   8:             <Link href="http://yacktrack.com/home?query=${link}"/>

   9:         </FeedFlare>

  10:     </FeedFlareUnit>

See any similarities?  How about the whole thing! Yeah.  As I said, dead simple.  Had I known it was this easy to whip up a FeedFlare when I started blogging, scribkin would have like a dozen custom ones by now.

Moral

Don’t be afraid of a little code, or to try new things.  Sure, often you can get in over your head.  You can always bail if you have to.  Other times, you might the just the right thing done at the right time and get a lot of enjoyment out of it besides.

You can find the new YackTrack FeedFlare in operation, below.

posted June 6th, 2008 in Followup, Status | Tags: code, feedburner, FeedFlare, scribkin, status, Wordpress, xml