ReadBurner Feeds the NewsGator
That is probably the punniest headline I’ve written to date. Sorry for the groan.
Taming the gator
The news from ReadBurner is anything but a joke, though. In short, ReadBurner now supports direct sharing from all the NewsGator products: NetNewsWire, NewsGator Inbox, NewsGator Online, and last but not least, FeedDemon. Of course, transparent support continues for Google Reader and Netvibes.
Full instructions for adding your shared articles can be found here, or by going to the home page and clicking on the light-gray Add Feed link.
Once your feed has been recorded in ReadBurner, your shared items will immediately start being tallied in the system. ReadBurner is (what they call) a 100% democratic aggregator. That means that the system does what it can to make sure each share is counted, but with no redundancy. This means that, as you surf their site or subscribe to one of the aggregate RSS feeds (I recommend the climbing category), you will get unique stories that haven’t been gamed.
They have also added a new color to the share names. Now, along with blue for Google Reader and green for Netvibes, you have RB orange for NewsGator folks!
The other bit of news is that ReadBurner supports ajaxed iframes to render a preview of any article on their site!
Slick Ajax Iframes! .. Iwhats?
Basically, an iframe is an embedded web site or other formatted data inside of a browser window. It is different from a popover or popunder browser window in that the frame is still part of the web page you are viewing. Combine iframes with ajax (a fancy web enhancement that lets parts of web pages update without refreshing the entire page), and you have some really flashy effects.
So if you want to see an example of ajax, and you are reading this on my web site, you can click on the ReadBurner logo up at the top of this article to get a larger version.. in an iframe.
ReadBurner uses a similar effect in a couple of different places. The new development is embedded in the story headlines on their site. You can see an example by clicking on the thumbnail to the right.
To get the pop-up iframe, simply click on any bold headline on the page. If you want to go to the original article, they have added a big red arrow next to each article that will navigate you to the article in question.
This feature has already generated a bit of debate, so no matter if you love it or not, they are ready to hear your side. Just go to the official blog and leave a comment.
The other place, in case you were wondering, is the tabs across the top of the ReadBurner page.. the ones for NewsGator, Netvibes, and Google Reader. They will bring up those respective pages inside the ReadBurner page. Smooth.
Now Go Enjoy
Hopefully, you will really dig the new functionality, especially if you are a NewsGator user. Head over and see if you can’t find a few new blogs to follow or subscribe to. And if you run a blog, be sure to get your chicklet (I actually call them widgets) and proudly display how many times your articles have been shared!
By the way, if you want to know where I stand you can see my chicklets on my contributors page.