ON CROSSING THE STREAMS WITH FEEDBURNER

IF IT AIN'T BROKE, DON'T FIX IT

I broke the afore-mentioned rule today.

If this blog looks a bit different, you have Six Apart, the company running Typepad, on which this blog is hosted, to thank.  The company announced yesterday that it's integrating it's feeds with FeedBurner:

" This afternoon we introduced a new feature to TypePad that we're very excited about. You can now seamlessly connect your TypePad weblog's feed to FeedBurner. If you're already using FeedBurner, this means once you connect your feed, all of your readers who subscribe to your TypePad feeds will automatically receive that content from FeedBurner."

Well, since I already subscribe to FeedBurner, this was a no-brainer for me.  I went ahead and integrated the feeds. 

Sounds like something from The Ghostbusters (via Script-O-Rama):

 "VENKMAN
	On the count of three!  One ... Two ...
	SPENGLER
	No!  Them!  Shoot them!
		Cross the beams.
		VENKMAN
	No!  You said crossing the beams would be BAD."

(There's another version of this excerpt in the comments below, 
courtesy of Charlie O'Donnell).

Well, one thing led to another, and the next thing I knew I was exploring other FeedBurner services to activate on this blog.

That lead to adding FeedFlare, which adds the various action buttons at the end of every post (see below).  This is something I'd been meaning to do ever since VC Fred Wilson wrote about it a while ago, but never got around to it.

While making these changes, I decided to do away with the ads on this site, including the Typepad-enabled Tip Jar.  Both were experiments to see how those technologies worked on this blog, and for now I've decided to go with the cleaner look without the ads.

I also removed afew other items in the sidebars that were also experiments.

Hopefully this will make the site load faster for readers.

The only wrinkle in adding FeedFlare from FeedBurner, is that I had to convert the main template of this blog to "Advanced Templates". 

While the FeedBurner instructions on adding FeedFlare to a Typepad blog were very thorough, clear, and geeky, they DID NOT explain that converting the blog to using Advanced Templates would do away with the ability to use the "drag and drop" Typepad capability to easily move around and add/delete items in the two sidebars of this blog.

This means that future changes to this blog will mean my getting much more conversant with editing HTML code in the Advanced Templates, including trying to do things like adding FeedBurner's other services like FeedBurner Email.

So future changes to this blog may be slower coming.

And that may be a good thing if you like the look of the blog as is right now.

In the meantime, feel free to try out the FeedFlare buttons at the end of this and future posts.  Hope you find them useful.

Comments

[Charlie]

That's a pretty mangled Ghostbusters script you got there... Since I've seen it like 1000 times, I can tell you that its way off. :)

Here's a good version:

Egon: I have a radical idea. The door swings both ways. We could reverse the particle flow through the gate.
Peter: How?
Egon: We'll cross the streams.
Peter: Excuse me, Egon, you said crossing the streams was bad.
Ray: Cross the streams...
Peter: You're gonna endanger us, you're gonna endanger our client. The nice lady who paid us in advance before she became a dog.
Egon: Not necessarily. There's definitely a very slim chance we'll survive.
Peter: I love this plan! I'm excited to be a part of it. Let's do it!