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July 15, 2005

Update - Feedburner (BuzzBoost)

Michael Arrington

13 comments »

Company: FeedBurner (BuzzBoost)

Location: Chicago

Previous Profiles: June 14, 2005, July 4, 2005

What’s New?

FeedBurner has been launching a ton of new features lately, and BuzzBoost, announed on July 11, is worth noting.

In their own words, “Enter BuzzBoost. It’s the latest publicity and awareness offering for FeedBurner publishers, and it’s free. BuzzBoost’s job is to redisplay your feed content anywhere you can copy and paste a short snippet of HTML code — in a Blogger or TypePad page template, on a corporate website, or even in a “signature” block on a message board. BuzzBoost code is just a short line of JavaScript that displays content items and information from a FeedBurner feed according to settings you provide. You get to control how BuzzBoost displays the following elements:

* Feed Title
* Item publication date
* Individual item headlines, headlines and plain text, or headlines and original HTML
* Plain text item excerpt length
* Link to download podcast enclosures (if available)

We know that publishers who are familiar with Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) would also want to precisely control the styling of whatever BuzzBoost generates. Therefore, BuzzBoost has the right hooks in the generated HTML to make sure you can style each of BuzzBoost’s elements, which we have documented (see the links at the bottom of this post.)”
Link

Tris Hussey at Qumana posted about this a few days ago and saw the power of it immediately - you can cross promote blogs, and use any RSS feed in new ways. For instance, Tris is thinking about taking RSS feeds of prospective search queries and promoting them through buzzboost - very creative! This isn’t new technology, it’s just a very easy and cool implementation.

Feedburner will create an html script for you based on your parameters, or you can take the source html and entirely customize it.

To use it, if you already have burned feeds at Feedburner, click on “publicize” from the control panel area, and choose “buzzboost”.

You can then select certain parameters, and choose a standard snippet or take the html and edit it directly:

snippet:

full Code:

Here’s how it looks in action:


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This entry was posted on Friday, July 15th, 2005 at 2:05 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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  1. Satish Talim

    July 15th, 2005 at 4:11 am

    Not knowing much about html/css etc., all this looks very formidable. Hopefully someone will come out with a simple template. I agree, this facility is very helpful.

  2. Michael Arrington

    July 15th, 2005 at 5:05 am

    Satish, If you can add a code snippet to your sidebar or anywhere else on your blog, you can use this. Feedburnder will create the snippet for you. I’m happy to help you out, just send me an email. Mike

  3. Tris Hussey

    July 15th, 2005 at 6:53 am

    Hey thanks for the mention Michael!
    Here’s the page I created: http://blog.qumana.com/blog/_W.....ebuzz.html

    Didn’t take too long, but FB could make some improvements in that regard.
    T

  4. Michael Arrington

    July 15th, 2005 at 7:51 am

    Tris, That’s a cool use of this.

  5. John Zeratsky

    July 15th, 2005 at 2:51 pm

    Hey Tris — Nice work on the Qumana buzz page! You could even splice each of those feeds together (using FeedBurner), then use BuzzBoost to display a stream of newest-at-top buzz from *all* your feeds together.

    Also, what do you think we could improve on? We’re definitely open to suggestions.

  6. Michael Arrington

    July 15th, 2005 at 11:11 pm

    John, one problem is that the code snippets (see mine aboe) do not show up in RSS feeds. Pulls a total blank.

  7. John Zeratsky

    July 16th, 2005 at 10:37 am

    Michael, what reader are you using?

  8. Michael Arrington

    July 16th, 2005 at 11:40 am

    That’s actually a funny question. If you look at all of the reviews in this blog, you’ll see that I am currently running bloglines, newsgator web, pluck web and pluck firefox, feedlounge, and feednation. I literally run all of them to see what the differences are. I am also running lecktora and yahoo. :-)

    But to your question more directly, I noticed that at least on bloglines and newsgator the script didn’t show.

    John, if you want to take this “offline” I’m editor@techcrunch.com. :-)

  9. Brad Pitt

    July 26th, 2005 at 8:16 am

    Dont play with me boy http://www.getfirefox.com

  10. Peter Cooper

    July 30th, 2005 at 7:34 pm

    BuzzBoost is pretty cool for what it does, but if you want more control (over every shade of formatting, or perhaps mixing other feeds with your FeedBurner one), you can put your FeedBurner feed into FeedDigest and get total control and more output options to boot (including PHP).

  11. Protrox

    February 14th, 2007 at 12:21 am

    Peter, I agree with you, BuzzBoost helped me more then any other of it’s category.

  12. Antonio

    February 28th, 2007 at 6:38 pm

    Very nice site! Good work.

  13. Diether

    July 11th, 2007 at 3:40 pm

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