I’ve been experimenting with two feed related things I thought you might be interested in:
Related posts – If you don’t already have the w-a-s-a-b-i related posts plugin installed, you should. There are few things that have increased the pageloads in my sites as much as this plugin. Once that’s installed, you can pick up the plugin that will add those related posts to your feed at Solo Technology.
FeedFlare – This is a nifty little thing I knew nothing about until Char and I wanted to offer a jointly authored free e-book to subscribers at our kids sites. I knew I had seen it when I subscribed to Chris Garrett’s feed to get his excellent e-book. After some research, it turns out the answer was right inside Feedburner under the Optimize tab. FeedFlare has built in options for allowing readers to act on your content, such as Stumbling, or Digging it, and you can also add your own “flare” by following Feedburner’s excellent reference guide.
At first I was a little put off by the XML thing, as I’ve really not gotten into that much and don’t understand it. I searched for quite a while for something I thought should have been easy to find- all I needed was a basic template so I could just fill in the blanks to create my XML file that would contain a simple link to a page on my site. I finally found one, and since I didn’t keep the link, I can’t find it again of course, so… here is a template you can use to create your own feed flare with a simple link. You’ll want to just right click on that link and save it to your computer. Then, after you’ve edited it, upload it to your site, and link to it in the Personal FeedFlare section. You can then test it by viewing your feed (link at top left of the FeedFlare area).
Now…don’t you want to click on one of those related posts?
Hey – thanks for the nice plug. Here’s a bit more info on the related posts plugin.
Feedflare is interesting to experiment with, I’m just not sure how to figure out how often stuff is clicked on/through though…
This looks to be a GREAT plug. You always have useful information here and help me get ahead . . .using all of this geek stuff.
Thanks for everything.
Julie
@Chris – I guess it depends on what you’re putting in the FeedFlare. I could tell what response I was getting because of pageloads of the special page I had set up for the e-book.
Quick question: the related posts link doesn’t seem to work (the link to Wasabi). Anybody got one that does?
Oh dear – I’m sorry. That was their old link. I fixed it. Thanks.
Well, I performed the install and clicked the link at the bottom to run the query, it brought up my custom built 404 page, is that what it is supposed to do?
The reason I ask, is because I thought that the 404 meant the plugin script had failed so I broke into my MySQL database and ran the script from command line, but I got a message saying that one of the fields had already existed.
I don’t remember getting a 404 when the script failed to automatically set up the tables when I installed it. Seems like it popped up a window and told me it failed….? It’s been a while. Anyway, I went in to the SQL and did it manually and it worked. I’m not sure what might be the problem. You could try searching the WordPress support forums. That’s what I usually do when something like that happens.
Is this the code you ran, or did I run it incorrectly?
ALTER TABLE `wp_posts` ADD FULLTEXT `post_related` (`post_name` , `post_content`)
Looks right to me…
Here is a link to the Wasabi discussion at wordpress.org;
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/106285?replies=3#post-578329
In case anyone else is having any difficulties.
BTW, great blog!
UPDATE: Now I feel really, really stupid! Chris dealt with this exact issue with a couple of others at the following site:
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/104927?replies=7
Please don’t make fun of me.
Thank you, Randa. I use Feddburner, but had never even noticed the FeedFlare option. I’m off to make my own. Perhaps I should post a number of different XML templates when I’m done–if anyone’s interested.
@johno – that’s a great idea. Take a look at the catalog first- there are lots that are already created.
Thanks a lot Randa, for sharing this. I noticed that feature on some feeds I read and I was wondering how they are doing it.
[...] Encourage RSS subscriptions — you could use the Feedburner FeedFlare service (accessible via the ‘Optimize’ tab inside your Feedburner control panel) to add a link to your eBook at the bottom of each feed you publish. Let your readers know that each feed subscription comes with a bonus eBook. You can see this method in action at ChrisG.com. Here are instructions on how to do it. [...]
Thanks very much for the help, Randa.
I’ve uploaded one for the prize draw and it seems to be working great.