Blog Changes

Just some notes on a few changes I’ve made to my blog setup.
Firstly I’ve added the Make Poverty History white band to the home page. Obviously not visible if you’re reading this in a browser but its a cause I do believe in, so why not go and click that link and find out how you can get involved?
Secondly, a while ago I altered my MT templates to spit out a scutterplan for my blog, which is now seeAlso‘d from my FOAF description. You can see it here. Pretty basic to start with, just a few FOAF and DC terms.
Thirdly, and you’ll have already noticed this, I changed my RSS 1.0 feed to include full postings. This was at user request, but was something I’ve been intending to do for a while. I much prefer being able to read full postings in my aggregator.
Lastly, I’ve been playing a bit with Feedburner. I was interested to see what facilities they offer for managing and tweaking RSS feeds. The interface is pretty slick and they’re offering some statistics on feed usage. I guess they have some relationship with the guys at Bloglines because now that I have a Feedburner version of my feed, when I click my “subscribe with Bloglines” bookmarklet, its the that version, not the one linked from my blog thats offered up my Bloglines. Presumably this has already caused endless debates elsewhere in the blogosphere. I don’t think I’m very happy about it as if there’s a “sanctioned” version of my RSS output I’ll link to it, thanks very much.
Frankly though the Feedburner features, while pretty inclusive, are not enough for me. I’d like the ability to splice together any number of feeds, not just those from a couple of services. E.g. my Feedburner feed includes my flickr photos and del.ico.us links. But what about my recent listening feed from Audioscrobbler? After signing up I wrote some code to do this, turned out to be a few lines using Informa. I’ll publish that as an example/service when I get time.
I am interested to find out more about how FeedBurner are capturing statistics. IMO, monitoring RSS feed usage is the next big issue (if its not already). More on that in another post.