Working at Home on the Internet » FeedBurner

How to Brand Your RSS Feed Using Your Logo

Joe Hauckes — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:31:54 +0000

ScreenCast to add Logo's to Feeds

The other day in my Video I told you that I would do a ScreenCast on MCBS (if you want to check it out) showing how easy it is to add Your Company (or personal) Logo to your RSS Feeds & e-mail subscriptions on FeedBurner.

There are only a few steps involved…

Login to your FeedBurner account
Go to the Feed where you want to add your Logo
Click on the Optimize Tab
Navigate to the Feed Image Burner page (in the Sidebar)
Click on Image Source and choose Specify Custom Image URL
Add your Custom Image URL
- Add the Image ((Logo) Title
- Add a Link to your Home (Landing) Page
- Be sure to Activate and Save
Done

Easy. Now the next time a Subscriber brings up your Feed in their reader of choice, your Logo will be right there on the Top of the Page.

Now there is no excuse for not Branding your Site on Feeds & e-mail.

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Why Google? Why, Why, Why?

Joe Hauckes — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 17:25:49 +0000

An Open Post for Google

Why, every time you take over a fully functional and vibrant service, do you break it?

Yes, I’m talking about FeedBurner again.

Within ONE DAY I lost HALF of my RSS Subscribers. I did the Nine Things that should have saved subscribers the need to re-subscribe to my feed. I tried to follow every step prescribed on the FeedBurner Blog for the transition. I even updated the Feeds I Subscribe to, just to avoid any problems.

But, I still lost 1/2 of the subscribers I had.

HOW? What did I do wrong to piss Google off? Is it because I didn’t subscribe to Google Analytics? Because I haven’t signed up for AdSense for Feeds?

Please, tell me…

Looking on the replacement Blog, the Google Adsense Blog, I found No Answers, so what do I have to do?

This is almost enough for me to just throw in the towel and give up trying to supply my readers with current information using RSS and hope they find me through YOUR search engine.

Sincerely,

Joe

Have you had a drastic drop in your subscriber numbers? Have you found the answer?

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9 Must Update Google/FeedBurner Links

Joe Hauckes — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 18:56:00 +0000

Ok, I’ve calmed down a little from the Google/FeedBurner fiasco. Not totally, but enough not to rant and to give you some pointers on what HAS to be Changed, either now or in the near future if you have a FeedBurner account.

This is a list of what I had to change on Three different blogs:

Links for RSS & e-mail subscriptions in the Header, Sidebar
RSS & e-mail for What Would Seth Godin Do plugin (offers subscriptions to new visitors)
Simple Pie plugin for sidebar updates of current posts (2 blogs)
FB Subscription count buttons
Feedflare code for links in posts and feeds
Headline animator (1 blog)
FeedBurner Feed Replacement plugin to make sure all subscriptions count in stats (it has since moved & redirects to Google Search)
RSS ads through FeedBurner for WAH business network
Waiting for response from Text Link Ads to see if an update is needed (my RSS ads on feeds)

Did I miss anything?

At present Google/FeedBurner does have a redirect on all the old feed links, but they do advise to update to the new codes as soon as possible. I don’t know how long they plan on having redirects in effect, but why take a chance that you will forget to change them later when the new links become permanent?

So, my advice to you is find and change all your FeedBurner links and plugins and fancy doodle do hickeys NOW.

(See why I was so miffed the other day.)

UPDATE: Feed Flair from Google/FeedBurner DOES NOT WORK NOW. Codes have been updated etc, but it doesn’t work on the Site OR Feed. Not sure if it is actually FB or possibly the latest Upgrade to WP 2.6.5 because that was just done after the Feed change-over & I just noticed the problem today, but Other sites I have in my Feedreader that used to have FF don’t have it now either. Coincidence?

UPDATE 2: Per the Google FeedBurner known problems page…

29-DEC 2008: FeedFlare links are not currently showing for feeds hosted on feedburner.google.com. This is an issue the team is working on and hopes to have resolved as soon as possible.

At least I know it’s not a WP problem.

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Is NoIndex on FeedBurner a Way to Beat the Content Scrapers?

Joe Hauckes — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 21:39:02 +0000

A Very Short Story

In the not so long ago, I was having problems with a particular site scraping my RSS feeds to steal my content. If you have been following WAHI for any length of time, you know this is a continuing problem (many of you have faced the same dilemma too).

Of course, it happened again, but instead of trying to deal with the culprit as I did with the last thief, I started looking around for a better solution – one that would work for ALL such nefarious content stealers.

Gary over at Phoenixrealm seemed to be having the same problem, Bad Guys scraping his feeds. He was lucky enough to be alerted by a reader of his to the problem, so he put the question to his community.

In reading the comments section, I noticed a response from SEO Carley telling about a service provided by FeedBurner. NoIndex. Frankly, it could have been there for a while and I just never noticed.

A Possible Solution?

Go to your FeedBurner account, click the Publicize tab and down at the bottom click on the NoIndex link in the sidebar. By default it checks off “Indicate that your feed should not be indexed by search engines”, however, you need to Activate the Service. There is also a place to check if you do not want your feed indexed by Yahoo Pipes.

For me, this is in the experimental stage, if the feed isn’t indexed by the search engine spiders, it is highly unlikely that it will be picked up by the Scrapers Spiders.

In the same vein, it may not be picked up by some of the services you want to grab your feed. Things like We Blog Alot, Blogwise and services like Ping-O-Matic may not work either. Don’t know, I have to keep a close eye on some of these services.

How About You?

Have you tried the NoIndex feature in FeedBurner? Has it helped solve Your scraping problem? Is there a better way that you know of?

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FeedBurner COULD Help Fight Content Scrapers IF They Wanted To

Joe Hauckes — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 21:29:34 +0000

If you remember, the other day I wrote about how “Did You Rob Bill Gates Blog is a Thief” was stealing content from this blog’s RSS Feeds. It still is. Not only from me, but from many others as well.

I did a couple of things to try to alleviate the problem of content theft.

Here is a few of the things I have done.

I commented on their blog asking and then telling them to stop using my content without my permission.
I contacted AdSense (Google) stating that they (that blog) were infringing on my copyrighted material to no avail.
I searched for and Blocked their IP address so they couldn’t access the blog directly.
I even added a line “IF YOU ARE READING THIS ON “DID YOU ROB BILL GATES”, IT IS STOLEN CONTENT! PLEASE DO NOT CLICK ON ANY ADS, IT WILL ONLY ENCOURAGE THIS THIEF!’ to the Copyright in the footer of the RSS Feed, which showed on their blog.

All with no discernible result.

However, there COULD be another way to solve the problem of SPLOGS Scraping Feeds, at least on FeedBurner.

As you can see from the above, they have this report in Feed Statistics called “Uncommon Uses“.

So, they already have an idea of people, bots and IP’s that are doing things that are a bit out of the norm. They even give you the option of telling FeedBurner that you know can trust the URL that they have tagged.

However, they only let you tell FB that you know the URL but they do Nothing with it. They don’t give you the option of Blocking it.

Since they can already track who or what is subscribed to your RSS, it makes sense that they have the ability to Block That Subscriber.

I think they should give us the option of Blocking Scrapers, especially since they can already identify them.

What do you think? Should FeedBurner give users the option of Blocking Scrapers in the Uncommon Uses portion of the reports?

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