FlatPress Blog Engine Guide

Monday, May 11, 2009

How to: Add FeedFlare Social Bookmarks

Having Social Bookmark links on your site encourages visitors to bookmark specific posts. This makes your site known to other member of the social bookmark service, which can increases visitors to your site. It can also improve your sites rating on search engines. Currently, FlatPress has no widget to add these links. There are a couple of themes, which include icon links to the more popular social bookmark sites. However, if you want to create your own custom set of quick links you will need to modify these themes yourself.

Another way to accomplish this is to use the Feedburner account add-on FeedFlare. This add-on allows you to select from a variety of social bookmarks you can add to your posts. After setting up an account and selecting social bookmarks, you will add a java script to your site’s theme. The process is same as adding Adsense ads to the bottom of your post. If you later decide to change which social bookmark links you want on your post, you only need to change your FeedFlare settings in your FeedBurner account. Then after a some time your changes will show up on your posts. You do not need to change java code you already added to your theme.

FeedFlare uses text links (no icons). For some social bookmark services, it lists how many visitors have bookmarked a post. There are currently 8 official social bookmarks offered by FeedBurner. However, they provide a catalog of quick links developed by the FeedBurner developer community. They include reddit, kick it, twitter, and many more. Adding these links is simple and is explained later in this post.
Here is a sample screen shot of FeedFlare footer

Steps for adding a FeedFlare footer to each of your posts.

1. Login into your Feedburner account. Create one if you do not have one.
2. Select Optimize tab.
3. Select the FeedFlare option on services menu located on the left side.
4. Under heading Official FeedFlare, select the links you want added to your site feed footer and your site. I recommend selecting the same links in both columns.
5. Scroll down to Add New Flare. You use this field to add other developer created bookmarks. To get a list of these, click Browse the Catalog. The Feed Flare catalog will pop-up. Scroll through this catalog and find what you are looking for. Return to your feed flare window to add any other other social bookmarks and to continue setting up your FeedFlare.
6. Return Feed Flare setup window if you clicked on Browse the Catalog
7. Scroll down to FeedFlare Preview/Ordering. In the feed and site boxes to drag and drop the links to the order you want them to appear. It is overly sensitive and takes trial and effort to adjust the order. Do not worry to much about the order because you can always come back and change it.
8. Scroll down to the bottom of the page. Click Activate. Click Save.
9. To get code click the drop options for Get the HTML code to put FeedFlare on your site: and select Other.
10. On the pop-up window scroll done to the generic box. Copy and paste the code into an editor you will be using to update your theme.
11. Close the pop-up.
12. Make sure you clicked save on FeedFlare you just set up and confirm it is active. When active, it will display the deactivate bottom.

Once you have java ascript for FeedFlare you will need to change it to work with FlatPress
Change POST-URL-HERE to {$id|link:post_link}

Sample

Change

<script src=”http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~s/FlatpressBlogEngineGuide?i=POST-URL-HERE” type=”text/javascript” charset=”utf-8”></script>

to

<script src=”http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~s/FlatpressBlogEngineGuide?i={$id|link:post_link}” type=”text/javascript” charset=”utf-8”></script>

Update Theme with FeedFlare

Follow the instructions in this post to add this java code to your theme. On my site, I added the code before the Adsense code.

Conclusion

Setting up FeedFlare can be difficult because Google is still migrating to their world. Sometimes it takes a while for changes made to FeedFlare options to appear on your site and in your sites RSS feed. The personal feeds you ad form the catalog may disappear because the XML file they use is hosted sites other than Google. So if you are worried about loosing it can try adding the code to your site and referencing its location on your site in FeedFlare.

• Posted by David at 12:29:05 in Post Enhancements
• 1 comment (451 views)