Hackathon III - Leader of the Hack

The developers at FeedBurner have been acting like a bunch of kids in the back of a station wagon lately ... "When's our next Hackathon?! Tell Chris to stop touching me!" After our last two successful endeavors, the Hackathon has become the anticipated event of the season here at FeedBurner HQ. One day spent exclusively working on pet projects that aren't on the Gantt chart. It's just like a Google engineer's "20% time," except, well, this is our third one in about a year, so let's call it "FeedBurner's 1.41% time."

This past Friday, June 16th, we all showed up in the conference room early in the morning, proposed our ideas, and came up with the gameplan. We then went immediately into "can't talk now" mode, frantically coding for an end-of-day presentation. When the buzzer sounded, the pizza and beer went down fast as everyone showed off their hacks, captivating the room and eliciting tears of joy from the business team who no longer had to run customer support for the day (if somebody answered your question on Friday using the word Adam instead of Atom, please resubmit your question).

While all of this is a lot of fun for us, it's usually a lot more fun for publishers when we get to unveil a bunch of new features, tweaks and services all at once. Here they are, as described by the developers themselves:

Map It FeedFlare, by Paul Baker

This dynamic FeedFlare looks for address information (city, state or postal code, and soon... full street address) in your posts. If found, the FeedFlare will display a link to the Google Map of the location. See it live in my blog. To activate this FeedFlare, simply log into your FeedBurner account, go to the "Optimize" tab and add http://paulbaker.net/fb/mapitflare.xml to your list of FeedFlares. Check the box next to feed and/or site to activate this FeedFlare whereever you please.

BuzzBoost Brush-up, by Rachelle Bowden

BuzzBoost just got snazzier with the addition of some new features. Your feed title now is linked back to your blog, you have the ability to add a link to subscribe to your feed right from BuzzBoost, and finally you can display your favicon.

Download Tracking Tweaks, by Jessie Chavez

Download tracking for enclosures have been split out into separate line items on most pages to allow for a clearer, more easily understandable view of download statistics. This breakout along with additional labeling, including which media file is being tracked, has been included in the Analyze tab's Dashboard, Item Use, and Single Item stats pages.

Subscribe to your FeedBulletin via Email (powered by FeedBurner), by Chris Frye

In the unlikely event that things go awry with your feed, you want to be alerted in a timely manner. Now you can use FeedBurner's Email Service to receive emails alerting you to any changes in your personal FeedBulletin feed. To activate this feature, sign in to FeedBurner, go to "My Account" and select the FeedBulletin tab. Enter an email address, that's all there is to it!

IP To Location, by Arun Kannan

Have you ever wondered which countries your Live Hits originate from? Well, wonder no more. Now, your Live Hits page displays the countries where your items are being viewed. Publicize your international reach, gain more insight about your audience and provide more relevant content.

MobileFeedStats, by Joe Kottke

Have you ever had that urge to check out your feed stats, but you're nowhere near a computer? You just need a quick fix to see if the subscriber number is up (YAY!), or down? (Boo...), but all you had was your mobile phone? Well now you can check your stats from almost anywhere, on almost any mobile web browser. Sign in using your FeedBurner username and password at http://www.feedburner.com/mobilestats/ and get that stats fix from almost anywhere. Coming Soon: Feed management from your phone...

FeedFlare Scratchpad, by Eric Lunt

If you've tried to develop a FeedFlare, you probably know that it's a bit ... how should we say this ... trial and error. Well, help is on the way! Introducing the FeedFlare Scratchpad. Now you can test that FeedFlare XML file against real feeds, and we'll even tell you if it's valid! In the unlikely event that your newly developed FeedFlare is not valid, we'll go so far as to tell you why. Amazing! Just visit the FeedFlare Scratchpad, paste in that FeedFlare code you've been thinking about, and marvel at the non-AJAXy goodness.

FeedBurner Publisher Module for Netvibes, by Steve Olechowski

Now there is a FeedBurner dashboard for Netvibes – here you can see the current circulation of any of the feeds in your account, as well as any Awareness API enabled feeds. Soon you will also be able to see your current FAN statistics and balance straight from Netvibes.

To add, simply follow this link, and configure the module with your FeedBurner username, password, and a comma separated list of any URIs you wish to track from your Netvibes personalized homepage. Alternatively, you can select “Add Content” and add a new module with this URL: http://www.olechowski.org/html/fbstats.html

The End of the "Email This" Flare Blues, by Matt Shobe

FeedBurner's popular FeedFlare service allows subscribers to interact directly with feed content items. One of the most popular interactions is to send a link to an item to someone else. The current "Email This" and "Email Author" Flares accomplish this with a "mailto" link. Internet Explorer 6, and some feed readers built with Internet Explorer as the internal browser don't like this link (here is why).

Enter the new "Email This" web form. Clicking one of our Email FeedFlare links now pops up a proper web page to allow you to send a link to the item from yourself to another recipient. This form should work in every browser and feed reader, allowing all who interact with FeedFlare to reliably email content links. And, no, we most definitely do not track or retain the addresses entered in this form; we despise such spammy tactics as much as you do.

FeedBurner Help Platform, by John Zeratsky

We've unified a pile of popup windows under one loving umbrella of MovableType-powered Help. Things are a bit sparse right now, but feel free to navigate our fledgling Help section via one of the previously orphaned popup windows (like this).

Of course, the best is yet to come -- watch for a full-featured Help section in the near future.