Scott Hanselman's ComputerZen.com

A number of folks have asked about the "flare" on my site that appears at the bottom of each post. This is possible via a number of things.

First, the current version of DasBlog (get it via SubVersion) supports FeedBurner directly. FeedBurner will host your RSS Feed for you and DasBlog will automatically redirect folks who ask for your original feed to the new FeedBurner one, like http://feeds.feedburner.com/ScottHanselman. This will allow you to manipulate your feed in a number of new ways, including the addition of "feed flare."

Gavin Joyce kindly created a FeedFlare for DotNetKicks.com that I put up at http://www.hanselman.com/blog/kickitflare.xml. I told FeedBurner, via their web-based configuration interface to use this new flare and it now appears automatically at the bottom of each of my posts along with a few other bits of flare.

Then I added this line to my itemtemplate.blogtemplate file in my DasBlog specific theme folder:

<script src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/ScottHanselman?flareitem=<%PermalinkUrlRaw%>" type="text/javascript"></script>

This includes a bit of JavaScript from FeedBurner that creates the flare. I can have different flare in the feed and the site.

NOTE: Apparently there's some kind of known bug in FeedBurner on their side related to DasBlog's correct usage of the Description element in the RSS Feed, but they know about it and they are working on it. This causes, it seems, flare to not display in some aggregators.

I've been VERY happy with FeedBurner and it's cut my bandwidth in half and added a host of new abilities like more detailed statistics on the number of subscribers, where they're from and what aggregator they use.

So, the combination of DasBlog's auto-redirect, the FeedFlare API, modifying the DasBlog item template and their FeedFlare JavaScript make it so.