E L S U A ~ A KM Blog Thinking Outside The Inbox by Luis Suarez

Feedburner Plugin 2.1 – Keeping Track of All of Your Syndication Needs

Yesterday I created a weblog post where I was announcing elsua’s new look (Oh, by the way, do not forget to check the About document as you would be able to see an updated page with some further details about me along with some fancy new design. Love it!) and today I thought that I would share with you one really good hat tip on how you can get the most out of your syndication needs by making extensive use of Feedburner as part of your own weblogs. For quite some time now I have always wanted to find a way to get some statistics on the number of readers who are actually getting my content syndicated through different methods, RSS, Atom, Yahoo, BlogLines, etc. etc. For some time now I have been using Feedburner as well to shed some light along those lines and give me some partial numbers of the total readership through syndication.

And just recently I found out that instead of having to mess up with different files like .htaccess and the like there is this awesome WordPress plugin that actually does everything for you really easy and without you having to worry about anything else than just installing and activating the plugin itself.

Check out Feedburner Plugin 2.1, created by Steve Smith, over at orderedlist. What a fantastic WordPress plugin! You just basically install it in your own server like you would do with any other plugin (Check out the instructions directly available in this link), then activate it and you are ready to go. Of course, you would need to configure it under the sub-tab Feedburner from the Options menu, but I am sure that by now you would have already got one profile at Feedburner, like I do. And from there onwards you can just watch the total feed count grow larger and larger.

I remember how before doing this Feedburner was actually capturing 62 syndication hits and after installing the plugin the current hit count at the time of writing this weblog post is 216. Yes, indeed, 216! More than triple the amount of original feeds tracked !

Fantastic ! I am really excited about this because I never thought that I had so many other readers subscribed via RSS, Atom and whatever other feeds and the fact that I can now get Feedburner Plugin 2.1 to do that job for me is just wonderful! A huge time saver! A special thanks to Steve for putting together such a fine piece of work, and, most importantly, for sharing it with all of us! Well done !

(Oh, and don’t forget to check some of the other goodies that Steve has been putting together. You may find something else worth while checking further and playing around with. I already did!)

Tags: Feedburner, Feedburner Plugin, Steve Smith, Orderedlist, WordPress, Plugins, WordPress Plugins, Syndication, RSS, Atom, Newsfeeds, Productivity Tips, Blogging Tips

Am I Imagining Things or Has It Finally Catched Up?

(Migrated weblog post from LSR)

I mean, FireFox. Just by one of those knowledge accidents you bump into every now and then (in this case a weblog post from one of my work colleagues) I just find out that FireFox seems to have a zoom feature available. Well, it is not using that name for the feature itself but it would have the same effect, or pretty close. Indeed, if you load a web site with FF and you find out that the font size is far too small for you to read anything on it, you could just use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + ‘+’ (the plus sign) or Ctrl + ‘-’ (minus sign) and it will increase / decrease the font size which will give that zoom effect.

I must say that it is not as clean and smooth as you would expect, specially if you have tried Opera‘s zoom effect, but still it would provide you with the desired results, which is basically see larger font sizes. One thing though where it may not be surpassing Opera is the fact that as you zoom in / out in a web site the information displayed would still be a lot clearer in Opera than in FF, and this is probably where there seems to be plenty of room for improvement.

However, for some basic functionality it would do the trick. With Opera though, it is state of the art and certainly what some other web browsers have been trying to innovate for quite some time now and have failed, to date, to come up with such a good feature as that one in Opera.

Nevertheless, it is still a handy keyboard shortcut to know about although I am still not sure why it has not been added into the FireFox Keyboard Shortcuts web site yet. Maybe they are waiting for the next marketing wave saying they have invented and incorporated zooming in a web broser. Who knows.