Feedburner Custom FeedFlare

I’ve used FeedBurner to serve up the RSS/XML items from this blog for sometime now. But I don’t generally visit the FeedBurner site on any regular basis. I mean maybe 2-3 times a year I’ll go into the account and look around. Seems like every time I go into FeedBurner I find something new or an older feature enhanced. These guys rock!

Case in point is the FeedFlares. Not sure what FeedFlares are? If you read any RSS feeds you will see little text ads added between the RSS items. These ads are generally call to action links like, “Digg This!”, Bookmark on del.icio.us”, etc. At the time this feature was added they offered a pretty standard list of FeedFlares.

This weekend I logged into my FeedBurner account and went over to the FeedFlame section and noticed something interesting. The now offer the ability to add your own custom FeedFlares. Interesting. So I started looking at the API. They even offer a FeedFlare sandbox to test out the XML. Fully functional with you actual feeds.

As noted the general list of social bookmark sites offered in the FeedFlare list I wanted something a little more specific to my site. I wanted to add a text link in the FeedFlare items to my web host, WestHost. I’m a member of their affiliate program and at one time had ad ad on my site for them. Affiliate programs are all about getting links out and getting paid. So I stared playing around. Without about 5 minutes I had the XML in the sandbox ready and previewed. Next step was to save the XML file on my site somewhere. Then to add the URL to the XML into the FeedFlare list. Boom boom boom!

Like magic the FeedFlare link was added. Look for the “Site Hosted at WestHost” link at the end of the list below. Or check out my RSS feed for the real links.

WestHost.com – For all your Web Hosting

Back in the turn of the century (yeah I’ve been waiting a few years to use that) when I was looking for hosting as more a playground to host my website, I went through probably 100 different company review. At the time I was still mostly an application developer running Linux on a partition on my Dell laptop. So I was looking for a host that offered more than just FTP access to my site. I wanted a host that offered shell/SSH access as well as the ability to compile/install/run my own applications. At the time I was working in C as well as Java, so a host offering Tomcat in addition to Apache was a big plus.

After whittling through the hosting offering at the time. I came across a few that offered dedicated hosting. Well I didn’t want to run a simple site on a $100/month hosting cost. I had to find something else.

Enter WestHost. For almost 8 years I’ve used WestHost.com to host this blog as well as recommend them to friends and clients. The monthly cost is well under $15/month but the product offering is fantastic. On my site I have 10G of disk space and 100G of monthly bandwidth. I have many standard packages that install with a simple click like WordPress, PHP5, MySQL5, Perl, Joomla, Spam software for hosted email. I also have access to the GNU GCC compiler which is standard on my host to compile my own applications. I have unlimited MySQL databases and unlimited email accounts. Unlike MT and others that want an extra $25/month for extra MySQL databases. Better than all this the support team rocks. I rarely have issues but when I do I simply email the support list. Within a few minutes I generally have an answer and solution.

So if your looking for hosting that offer more flexibility for the right price check out WestHost.com.

Which type of programmer are you?

Had some free time this afternoon after killing bugs and playing some Half-Life 2 (Episode 2). So I fired up my FireFox browser and was clicking the StumbleUpon toolbar. Hitting page after page I can across two interesting pages that affected me directly since they were tied to the discipline of programming.

I’ve been a developer for almost 20 years. From the dark ages in the early 1990s as an application developer on Windows (C/C++), Unix (SCO, HPUX, Linux, Sun, Mainframe). To the Web world from the late 1990s forward, I think I’ve seen all the characters mentioned.

Question for you the reader is which one do you identify with?

10 types of programmers you’ll encounter in the field

A trip…riding on a Leopard

It’s was Friday, October 26 early afternoon. I was sitting in my study working hard on some project. Trying to get things wrapped up before the end of the day so I didn’t need to work over the weekend on it. There was a knock at the door. Actually, the dogs alerted my about a minute before the knock. The UPS truck had pulled up in front of the house. I ran to the door with anticipation. It’s hear! It’s hear!. And it was. It had arrived.

My copy of Apple’s Leopard 10.5 operating system, the next version of OS X had arrived. But this was hours before anyone could purchase the product in stores. Still I was totally happy to finally get the package in the mail. The big burning question was do I continue working on my task at hand or drop everything and start the install. Surely I could do the install and get back to work. For all the ads I’ve seen the install is a snap and should be back online in no time.

But because I’m so focused on my job these days I chose the safe route and returned to my project code. I had a conference call with my boss, Brian, in a few minutes. And yes I planning on bringing up the topic of Leopard. Still as I’m on the phone I caught myself holding the little box that contained Leopard in my hands. Dreaming of the moment I’d be ready to install the new software.

With my phone calls done. My project code saved and backed up to the external drive I’m now ready. I close all applications and with a little anticipation insert the OS X Leopard disc into my laptop drive.

The popup window provides the simple instructions. So after a few clicks my system restarts. I’m presented with the install steps. First is to select the destination drive. I click next. I’m familiar with this step since most mac application will have you choose the destination volume to install a downloaded package. Generally this is represented as an image of a hard drive. But wait, the volume listing is blank. I wait…and wait…and wait, nothing. Could the issue be I confused the install by keeping my external drive connected? hmm. Pull the USB cable disconnecting the external drive. Mash the power button. Let’s try this again. Second attempt. System comes up blah blah blah. Get to the step where I left off. This time I see my volume. Select it and move on.

The install didn’t take all that long, maybe an hour. For my installation the option to create an archive was selected. I did not notice this. I guess I was still blind with anticipation of the new OS X operating system. Once the install finished and I rebooted the glory of the new glow of the interface painted the room. Bird were singing, the dogs and cats in the house were holding hands in a circle and dancing around my chair. Then I started noticing things…

For one I noticed when I attempted to open Safari it would not. I kept getting the window “The application quite unexpectedly. Do you want to relaunch?”, yes. After a few cycle of this I gave up. Can I live with just FireFox? I started noticing other things not quite right. Like my hard drive was now 82% full. What the F!? I had spent the last week burning shit off the drive just to clean up space. Before I started the install I was just under 50%. What to do? WHAT TO DO? I was still early in the late afternoon. Almost evening. Sondra would be home soon. Then dinner. I was thinking I would try a fresh install. I shouldn’t have any issues. I’ve backed up my system. I’ll try after dinner. This will give me the evening to re-install things I needed.

After dinner I started down the refresh install path. This actually took less time than the upgrade. Mostly as far as I can figure is because it’s easier to wipe the drive than to archive the existing contents. When the install finished I had the nice shiny new OS X Leopard purring on my laptop. And I had close to 75% of my drive free. YAY!. Now to reinstall the various packages and tools from the old system.

I spent most of the weekend installing packages like Adobe Creative Suite2, TextMate , etc. This is simple enough to find the package. For some I had a problem locating the license keys. This was mostly for applications I had purchased online.

All in all I’m glad I purchased Leopard. And don’t mind being an early adopter. And really glad I decided on the fresh install rather than trying to make things work with the upgrade. The only thing I can figure that might have bork’d Safari was the various plugins I had installed for Safari to make it more like FireFox with debug information.