FeedFlares for RSS Text Ads
Posted by Ken Cheung on Friday, September 29, 2006 in FeedBurner, How-to : : 4 commentsWhen TLA launched their Feedvertising RSS text ads, the text links reminded me of FeedBurner's FeedFlare. If you are reading this post from an RSS reader, you will notice a bunch of text links at the bottom of the post (like "Email this" and "Digg this"). FeedBurner calls those text links FeedFlares. Today, you will also notice text links for iZachy Home, Daddy Forever, Embedded Star, EDA Geek, and EDA Blog at the bottom of the RSS feed for each post listed. Those are FeedFlares I created for my other sites. My FeedFlares work in Bloglines, NewsGator, and Google RSS Reader. They work with other RSS readers too, but I've only tested on the readers mentioned previously.
Update: See comment #2 below for a simple way to create flares w/o XML.
If you use FeedBurner to burn your feeds, you can create your own FeedFlares too. Just copy and paste the code below. Change the bolded text to whatever you want. Then save the file as an XML file and ftp it to your web server. Next, log into FeedBurner and click on the Optimize tab. Click on the FeedFlare link on the left and activate it (button is at the bottom of the screen). Then enter the url where your xml file can be found (for example: http://izachy.com/zachflare.xml) and click on the Add New Flare button. If you have more than one flare, just repeat until you are done. Don't forget to check off the flares you want to use in your feed. You can also reorder the flares in the FeedFlare Preview/Ordering window at the bottom of the page. When you are done, click on Save. If you need more information, you can find it in the FeedFlare Developer Guide.
<FeedFlareUnit>
<Catalog>
<Title>iZachy</Title>
<Description>iZachy</Description>
</Catalog>
<FeedFlare>
<Text>iZachy Home</Text>
<Link href="http://izachy.com/"/>
</FeedFlare>
</FeedFlareUnit>
Here's my comparison between Feedvertising and FeedFlare:
| Feedvertising | FeedFlare | |
| Free | yes | yes |
| Works with RSS Feeds | yes | yes |
| Stats Available | probably not | probably need to upgrade to TotalStats PRO |
| Will Sell Ads for You | yes | no |
| Easy Setup and Configuration | yes | yes |
| Customization | yes | more customization than Feedvertising |
| Requires FeedBurner | no | yes |
| Requires WordPress | yes, other platforms to be supported soon | no |
| Banner Ads | no | not currently, but will eventually |
| Works with Server-side languages | no | yes |
| Text before and after link | yes | no |
| Affiliate Links | yes | probably yes (did not test) |
Fun analysis. We're going to make it even easier to use the freely available FeedFlare to promote your other publications and 'house ads' for text. The cool thing about feedflare is that since they're represented as images/links, we'll provide the ability to rotate different text through the same flare (which you couldn't do with straight text as it would mark the post as updated). This will allow you to cross promote your other content without having to add six flares, you can just rotate all of them through one. Customization will be made much more "dead simple" as well. Coming soon.
Ken, very cool. Just so you know, we also have a "GenericFeedFlare" that you can leverage without having to create your own XML file. See http://forums.feedburner.com/viewtopic.php?t=2841 for more information. For example, your FeedFlare could be represented as http://www.feedburner.com/fb/variableflareunits/GenericFeedFlare.jspx?text=iZachy+Home&link=http://izachy.com/ .
As Dick said, we're working on making this much simpler.
Eric Lunt
CTO, FeedBurner
Thanks Dick and Eric. The text link is actually an image - that explains why I couldn't copy and paste it. The generic flare is indeed simpler. Didn't know about that one before.
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