Comments on: FeedFlare? No Thank You.

By: John Lamansky » Blog Archive » Blogosphere Trend: Customer Service Comments

Fri, 21 Jul 2006 02:47:06 +0000

[...] It seems that it’s becoming more and more common for company representatives to post comments on blog posts related to that company or its products. For example, so far on this blog I’ve had comments from FeedBurner, Dell, and Microsoft employees, plus a comment from the CEO of FeedBlitz. [...]

By: John Lamansky

John Lamansky — Mon, 30 Jan 2006 03:01:22 +0000

Thanks John Z. For my desired feature set, I chose to use HTML rather than FeedFlare because I figured HTML would be much easier than creating a universally-compatible CSS customization solution for FeedFlare. I still do think custom HTML is better for simple links like “email this post” or “add to del.icio.us.” But thanks to your explanations and tips, I’ll probably consider utilizing FeedFlare again if I want to incorporate features that I cannot easily create myself, such as displaying the number of incoming Technorati links.

Thanks for all your work with FeedBurner! It’s a great service.

By: John Zeratsky

John Zeratsky — Sun, 29 Jan 2006 21:02:40 +0000

Thanks for your comments, John. I’d like to chime in here on a couple of the things you mentioned…

I definitely feel your Javascript pain — it’s just not as flexible or transparent as good ol’ HTML. We decided to go with Javascript so we could:

a) make enhancements and improvements to the code we are delivering, and
b) never force you to edit your template more than once.

With a Javascript include, you can go back to FeedBurner.com at any time and change your FeedFlare settings — we’ll instantly update the code that gets sent to your web site.

As for CSS, trust me — no CSS3 is required. You might have to get a little inventive, but you can do pretty much anything you want with basic (and well-supported) CSS 1 and 2.

Want to replace the bullets? Hide them, then place a background image as your separator. Want to list the links vertically? Set display:block on the elements. Don’t like the

? It’s a block-level element just like

and you can do whatever you like with it.

We tried to balance our publishers’ desire to customize FeedFlare’s look with our desire to make it easy and to make it work “out of the box” for our publishers. I think we’ve done a good job of that, but we’re always open to feedback. Thank you for yours!