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321

Someting like digg button

posted to feature requests by kromeboy 05/08/06     | delivered

it would be nice to have a promotional button that could be added on any blog post.
When a user press on this button will be immediately redirected to the specific post/vote/comment page or if the article isnt submitted already to the submit article page.

The image on the button should be personalized.

Is it possible?

searayman
05/08/06		 that woudl be grate! and fun!
bathow
05/08/06		 This is possible. We'll work on this. Thanks for the feature request.
el_guapo
05/14/06		 Good idea, Kromeboy! I've already had a user request this, and I would find it very beneficial when I post myself!
cbasturea
06/17/06		 Any news about the buton? :) Also, it would be nice to have a FeedFlare -- http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/publishers/feedflare
bathow
06/19/06		 Hi cbasturea,
We don't have this yet. We'll get to it. Regarding Feedflare, what sorts of things do you want in it? Excuse me if my question is wrong, I have heard of feedflare, but I'm not too sure what it does.
cbasturea
06/19/06		 bathow, Feedflare allows a blogger to add a small "footer" to its RSS feed, containing customizable actions (like "Email this", "Add to del.icio.us", "Digg this") that will appear at the bottom of each blog entry, in the feed. There is more info about it on Feedburner's blog, and you can see an example here.

So what I'm looking for is a FeedFlare that, once it's enabled in my Feedburner feed, will display -at the bottom of my blog entries, in the RSS feed- a link saying "Post this on CrispyNews"; it will act just like a bookmarklet - but one attached to my RSS feed. (Of course, we should be able to specify the URL for the CrispyNews community.)

Feedburner has a Feedflare developer guide here, and here's how a FeedFlare for Digg looks like.
bathow
06/19/06		 ah I see. great. thanks for the tips cbasturea.
Looks fairly straightforward. We'll get back to you with a feedflare prototype.

as far as the digg button goes: looks like this is very blogging platform dependent. not only that, you'll need access to the source code for your blog. From our side it is fairly simple in that all you need to do is reference http://something.crispynews.com/submit?link= in php for example. do people just want code to cut and paste in?
bathow
06/19/06		 OK. here you go. Let me know if this is what you were thinking

http://sports.crispynews.com/js/crispyflare
You can replace sports.crispynews.com with your own subdomain.

If this is it, we'll make it available from the front page.
kamichat
06/19/06		 This is very cool, but it dosn't seem to launch the add page. It gives me a message. "Post this item to the CrispyNews Network Add to New PR" and noting more. Am I doing something wrong?
cbasturea
06/20/06		 bathow, looks great -- thanks so much!

The flare has to be an xml file, not a JavaScript, though. I uploaded a version for the New PR here -- http://blog.basturea.com/extra/crispyflare.xml, and I activated it via FeedBurner. You can see it at the bottom of my blog entries in this Feedburner feed.

How should I change the code in order to be able to pass the entry's title, not only the URL, to the Feedflare link, so that people don't have to copy/paste the title?

Also, I think it would be cool to have a piece of code that people could add to their postings' footer ("Add to CrispyNews"); it would be useful for those who are not using Feedburner.

Kami, you have to save the file with the .xml extension, not with js, and it has to be activated from inside Feedburner, not used as it is now. Let's have the flare ready, and I'll post an explanation on how to do it.
searayman
06/20/06		 i am lost i dont get whats goign on anymore, now that its all tech talk.
bathow
06/20/06		 cbasturea, OK i'll stick that in for you.

Searayman,
Sorry about that. Currently, the tool is sort of broken. Let me fix it, and you'll be able to see it inside cbasturea's blog feed and I (or cbasturea, who knows what it is more than I do) can use it to explain it.

cbasturea
06/20/06		 Thank you!

Searayman, once we have this working, I'll post a detailed explanation - with screenshots - on how we can use the FeedFlare. Sorry about the technobabble.
searayman
06/20/06		 thast ok, just want to use a button liek htis lol
bathow
06/20/06		 Hi cbasturea,
here you go. I've changed the url to http://admins.crispynews.com/crispyflare1.xml for simplicity, and added the '1' since we are still in development phase. (apparently, the feedburner folks cache the xml, so if we want to make a change, we can't use that url anymore. We'll just use this temporary one and i'll change it over once we're done testing)
cbasturea
06/21/06		 Thank you! I tried to use the file, but Feedburner didn't accept it (not valid, apparently). So I posted a copy on my server - and it's working, but it doesn't pass the title :( I tried to make a couple of changes to the title=${title}, but it doesn't work... so I posted a question on Feedburner's Developer Forum.
bathow
06/21/06		 cbasturea,
Did you use admins.crispynews.com It could be not accepting it because admins is only restricted to those ppl that are admins. You may want to try another domain such as http://sports.crispynews.com/crispyflare1.xml instead and see if that works for you. it works for me

http://feeds.feedburner.com/wordpress/baldukakis< the reason it is probably not working on your server is because feedflare caches the xml, so if the name of the xml file is the same, it won't update it w/ the new xml for a while. You may have to rename that updated one (with the $title) as another file to get it to work on your server.
(not sure about this)

I'll be following the feedburner question.
cbasturea
06/21/06		 The Feedburner guys had the solution: escape the ampersand. I created a new flare for the New PR community - here's the example.

Now, what's next? :) Are you going to implement this for each community, or should we go ahead and make/host our own flares? Thank you!
bathow
06/21/06		 cbasturea,
Great. Glad you got the question answered. Yes, the advantage of our infrastructure is that everyone should have their own flares now automatically.
http://newpr.crispynews.com/crispyflare1.xml
http://sports.crispynews.com/crispyflare1.xml
http://navynews.crispynews.com/crispyflare1.xml
and so forth. This should already be available (and working now) for you, but you are most certainly welcome to host them yourself if you prefer. admins.crispynews.com won't, unfortunately, have a flare that is accessible since you need to be logged in to access the flare.

Let me know if you have trouble getting it to work.
cbasturea
06/22/06		 Awesome! It's working! :) You can see it in action in my blog feed.

Also, this allows people that are using Feedburner to add a CrispyNews bookmark at the bottom of their blog postings (on the blog, not only in the RSS feed) -- they just have to copy/paste the code generated in Feedburner, when they enable the flare. Look at the bottom of this image to see where you can find the HTML code.
searayman
06/22/06		 ok, so how do i use it?
cbasturea
06/23/06		 searayman - as promissed, here's how to activate the feed flare. Of course, you'll have to use the URL of your community's flare.

bathow - thanks so much for setting this up!
searayman
06/24/06		 what exactly is a pr flare?
bathow
06/24/06		 Hi searayman,
Here is some background information about Feedburner and RSS feeds, to supplement cbasturea's very helpful article.

RSS feeds is a technology that allows people to subscribe to other people's blog, and be notified when a new post is made. However, its often hard to see who is reading your RSS feed, and it often eats up alot of bandwidth (if you're running your own server).

Along comes a company called FeedBurner, who says "OK, create an account with us, and we'll give you more insight into who is subscribing to your RSS feed and reading your articles"

As part of this package, they offer users the ability to add some additional stuff (Feedflares) which allow the people subscribing to your RSS feed to add a button that says "add this to navynews.crispynews". When its clicked, it'll automatically post that news item to the site.

So this is very useful to someone who has a blog, writes often about a particular topic that might be interesting for crispynews readers. If a reader of his blog uses RSS, they have a nice button to click to stick the article they like up onto navynews (or other crispynews sites)

So a flare is described well in cbasturea's Jun 19th post in this thread. If you follow the link to the feedburner blog, they describe what the technology is about. They may do a better job than I do in describing what it is. If you have more questions, keep posting, and I"ll do my best to try to clarify.
el_guapo
06/28/06		 i havent been following this til now, but i def think this is a great feature. i think it will be very useful when trying to build up the community by contacting bloggers who might be interested in posting at a crispynews site.

good job to the devs & cbasturea for pushing this through!
taosk8r
07/01/06		 Could someone start from the beginning on this and post a complete tutorial on using feedburner on crispynews in general, and feedflares specifically?

I was trying to figure out where in the layout I could change the RSS feed button to the feedburner button mostly, but I think the above would be of benefit to all (so they wont have to comb through the above comments and come up frustrated like I did)..
drk
07/05/06		 While we are at it - a "blog this" button would be great - so stories could be blogged at the same time as being submitted.
drk
07/15/06		 taosk8r: It depends what you use feedburner for - I use it to (i) make long URLS shorter, (ii) reading RSS online - I'll give you an example.

Keeping up with Extreme Sports News can be a pain - its scattered everywhere - so I have a google News account which filters on 20 Extreme Sports keywords and feeds it into an RSS feed so I can read it anywhere.

BUT - the URL is stupidly long - impossible to remember.

So I made a feedburner feed - feeds.feedburner.com/newsmachine02 - its easy to remember and type for subscription purposes - but all it really does it take a long Google RSS URL and turn it into a short memorable one.

I get other benefits - the RSS feed still contains the original keyword information as categories (but different readers see it differently) - and I use the feedburner Title feature to burn every 20 keyword feed with the top level category information - then I can have as many filtered Google News feeds as I like and aggregate them or read them using RSSOWl or Omea - making news surfing easy.

Yeah - and adding a feedflareunit at this point to the Extreme Tales Filtered News RSS means that I can now send anything that appears in my news feed straight to CrispyNews Extreme Tales ....

I keep meaning to document the architecture of newsmachine, add some more categories and keyword cluster units and push the edges a bit more - and one annoyance is Googles "top stories" which appear in every feed - but experiments with FeedRinse are looking hopefull ... yeah and I keep meaning to add blogs and tags and find an online aggregator that doesn't strip out my feed titles when aggregated (like Rojo seems to do ...)

kingsleyj
07/22/06		 @bathow: can you make the submit page so that
1) the referring url is used if no link parameter is submitted? This will make for better page rank because then I can just ask my users to insert a link back instead of using javascript.
2) add a vote for that article if it has already been submitted?

For bonus points, if you can provide a js that just shows how many votes an article has, that would be super awesome.
bathow
07/22/06		 hi kingsleyj,
Can you give me a bit more detail about what you are thinking about?
1.) Right now, if the link is left empty, it points onto itself. This allows people to do a blog-style post instead of linking to an article. In regards to the referring url that you are talking about, I think depending on where they are coming from, the referring url could be something random. usually, it might be something like subsite.crispynews.com/popular/index since that is where the submit button is pressed from. So if the referring link (the http_referer parameter from the request) were used, it is possible that most links will point back to wherever the submit button was pressed. The time this would work would be when they came to the submit page directly from a link present on the page they wanted to link from. Is this the functionality you are talking about?

2.) Right now we take you to the article and tell you that it is already submitted. We earlier had it so that it 'votes' for you automatically, but we thought taking you to that page would be best since you can't really undo your vote. There's a good argument to be made for voting for them, but I'm not sure we want to just vote for them without getting their permission. Who knows? maybe there are instances where people do not want to vote for it if they couldn't add their own intro. Something that might work just as well could be to print out the message "The article has been submitted. You can vote on this one." or something similar.

For your last request, can you tell me what you want to be able to do? Are you talking about a javascript to embed on other sites, or a function like cn_num_votes to display the number of votes vs the total points?

thanks for the feedback
kingsleyj
07/23/06		 Hi bathow,
"The time this would work would be when they came to the submit page directly from a link present on the page they wanted to link from. Is this the functionality you are talking about?" - That's exactly what I'm talking about. I want to give my community a small piece of code that they can stick in their templates and have it do all the work. I see your point in #2, and i'd be okay with just being taken to the specific article, with appropriate text.

My last request would be a javascript embed on other sites, just like the link I'm talking about.

thanks for being uber-responsive!
bathow
07/24/06		 Hi kingsleyj,
We can do that, but I'm afraid that we won't be able to provide much value beyond figuring out the page. For example, there isn't a reliable way for us to figure out what the blog title is, and the url will be different if the page it is on is not the page they want to be linking from (from the blog's homepage, for example, as opposed to the full blog entry page). The only thing it would fill in is the link. Would something like that still be useful?

Most of the digg this type buttons you see are custom implemented by someone to take in the url for the blogtitle and url as parameters into the link. Ideally, thats what I would like to provide. However this is usually blog-platform specific (you have to insert in variables like the title and the title_url from the template in the blog) so we could provide directions, but wouldn't be able to implement it from crispynews since it would be different for every blog platform.

thanks for the clarifications.
kingsleyj
08/12/06		 I've got some code here... check it out: http://wiki.crispynews.com/wiki/Blog_Button
bathow
08/13/06		 whoa excellent.
thats awesome.
y0himba
Meadville, PA
 08/14/06		 How about that script for Digg?
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