Benjamin Golub’s blog

In case you haven’t noticed; I’m beginning to open up RSSmeme bit by bit.  If you are a blogger you can now automatically embed the number of shares for each post directly on your site or in your feed.

All the details can be found at RSSmeme.  I should note that the FeedBurner FeedFlare and widget accomplish two different goals.  The widget is nice because 1) you don’t need to be using FeedBurner and 2) it allows visitors who never frequent your RSS feed to see your share count and click on a link to share the post.  FeedFlare can accomplish this same goal if you install FeedFlare on your site (which is a similar process to installing the widget).  The FeedFlare will always have older data than the widget.  The widget is only cached for 5 minutes and I am not sure how long FeedBurner caches for but it seems to be on the level of hours not minutes.

Installing the widget seems daunting at first but it really is very simple.  The one gotcha I’ve noticed is people who install it but don’t wait for the page to fully load before assuming that it is not working.  The widget waits until the page is completely done downloading before working it’s magic.

A full fledged API is on my todo list.  I’m not sure how many of you would use it (not very many I’m guessing) but I’ll try my best.

Many thanks to Louis Gray, Steven Hodson, Frederic, and Chris Brogan for installing the widget/FeedFlare.  Check out their blogs to see it in action.