December 01, 2006
Headline Animator Overhaul, Part I
Historians believe that our Headline Animator service was the last known use of brushed metal backgrounds in a public web service. For a couple years now, FeedBurner publishers have courageously placed the one-size-fits-all Headline Animator widget in their sites, email sig files, forums postings, and elsewhere. We finally hitched up our pants, opened our Oscar Wilde phrasebook and announced "Either that brushed metal goes or we do".
We hereby violate our own policy of never releasing new features on a friday in order to provide you immediate access to the new "design your own" Headline Animator widget.
The New Headline Animator
There's a new theme you can choose within the Headline Animator service called "Design your own". When you design your own, you provide us with any background image url, you can even use our default, and this background image becomes a canvas on which you can paint your own headline animator. By "paint", we mean "pick some colors and fonts and then drag and drop some stuff around on your background image wherever you want". You can see why we prefer the shorter term "paint". Why do we think this is nifty? Here's an example of an existing Headline Animator widget, followed by a couple new designs using the new "Design your own" theme.
Old Skool Headline Animator Example
Yikes, can you say "photoshop for dummies"? Maybe we should join the rest of the kids in the 21st century...
New 'Design Your Own' Examples
oooooh, pretty.
So clean, so smooth, so....compelling!
What's Next?
Hey, the title of this post says "Part I", subtly implying that there might be other parts in the future. Yes, we're going to add the ability to have multiple styles of Headline Animator for a single feed and we're going to add a number of common themes and styles from which you can pick and choose instead of building from scratch. Coming soon.
Notes on the service
Very important for people currently using Headline Animator. When you change your Headline Animator, you change the way it looks everywhere it's currently being displayed. So if you change the size of the widget, keep in mind you're changing the live version of this widget wherever it's currently being rendered (in the right rail on your blog, for example). Similarly, if you build your own and then switch back to "classic" theme (ye olde brushed metal), then poof, your newly designed Headline Animator magically disappears into the digital abyss. Again, another iteration of this overhaul will provide for multiple saved versions. We wanted to get this simple "design your own" capability rolled out first to understand how people use it, what people like and don't like, etc. Keep those cards and letters coming - tell us what you think.
Comments
For the record, I would just like to point out that when we launched the original version, we got an extremely favorable deal on all that stainless because we bought in bulk.
Oh wow is this cool. Wow.
I'm delighted to see these new upgrades. Thanks guys. This makes a useful tool even more useful.
Now I have to update my book to talk about these new features.
Jason Van Orden
Podcasting Tips Blog
That is really really cool.
Now for Stardom, give us the ability to change how many headlines get displayed, the length of the headline and the algorithm used for selecting which headlines are displayed (most recent / most viewed / most commented on)
Good Job!
This is very cool! Here's an additional enhancement request: multiple designs per feed... I can think of many different applications where we'd like to use a different design on the same feed.
Very cool, I never used the old one because the look was (sorry I wasn't there at the beginning) really terrible. I'm trying the new one. But my blog is french, will it possible soon to translate "subscribe to my feed" in our own langage ?
Karine, that "subscribe" text is just in the background image used for that Headline Animator.You can put whatever you want in there.
Tom, we're working on that. From the post:
"Yes, we're going to add the ability to have multiple styles of Headline Animator for a single feed."
So hang in there :-)
Great news! This is just what all us silly bloggers have been waiting for...
db
when can Headline Animator support chinese?
Thanks for violating your Friday rule. This is well-worth it. Nice work.
THANK YOU!!!
I've been waiting for a change to the animator for a long time. GREAT to see "design your own".
The John Zeratsky example contains no 'powered by' tagline which I would prefer to use myself, but I don't see any way to do that.
LOL. Feedburner has the best "voice" of any Web 2.0 service. I haven't quite figured out how to use headline animator with mail.app, but hey, I enjoy the way you express yourselves.
Hammer, just use a background gif with no "powered by feedburner" in it.
Will there be a way to combine multiple feeds into one headline animator? So we could pick and choose which of our feeds to display and how many headlines from each? And if it displays all headlines from each source (say you want 2 headlines each from 4 sources) in a row or alternates them?
something like:
my chosen title bar
headline1-source1
headline2-source1
headline1-source2
headline2-source2
etc
or
Headline1-Source1
Headline1-Source2
etc.
This is fab, I've been using the email version since I signed up to FeedBurner.
Can we have the ability to bold the text. I designed my own but going to revert back because the headline text doesn't appear in bold so doesn't have the same impact.
Cheers
gfl
Great stuff! One note:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/9tz3.gif
The first headline (12/5 at the moment) leaves 3 permanent yellow dots below the line (at the p, and the 2 parens), and subsequent headlines don't fully display below the line (the g and y are missing their tails). It looks like there is some alignment problem in the headline field.
Otherwise, excellent work. I love these animators!
Do you host any wider images other than the 180px image? I understand that I can host my own image, but I'd prefer using yours if it's available.
I see this one now:
http://www.feedburner.com/fb/static/ss19-themes/ss19-default.gif
Is there a way to see what other themese or sizes are available, if any?
Jon, there will be a series of defaults in a future iteration of the service, probably ready in a few weeks (ie, right around the new year, give or take a week!)
I don't get it. Your other, much neglected headline animator is one of the best looking, um, badges, on the web. I was surprised to find it buried in all the whoopdie, still use and like it. Surprised because it is so ... tasteful? Did I say that?
Thank you for a very cool and useful feature.
I would second Gevera's suggestion above...that flexibility would be powerful.
In addition, how about having the animator (if not the feed) distinguish between post categories? It would be very useful to either...
create the feed based on sub-topics (categories; "Leadership" versus "Science & Technology" in my blog), or
have the feed sliced/diced by sub-topic/catoegory at the animator level.
THAT would be incredible!
Cheers!
@Zo: I'm glad you like the Classic edition (it's an old friend around these parts for sure) and rest assured it's not going away. We've moved things around a bit to better accommodate our new custom capabilities, and additional enhancements are coming shortly. Custom Animator capabilities have been a publisher request since 2004, so we knew we had to get these out there and feature them prominently. Going forward we'll meter the whoopdie as aggressively as possible, though.
@James: Agreed, all good suggestions and more fine-grained control of which posts get animation treatment is coming. Thanks for the comment!
wow! tnx
/me runs to change his forum sigs
Is it just me or the "dragging" feature doesn't work at all in OS X? I couldn't move the stuff around, as soon as I try to drag them they disappear. :)
