New FeedButton Features
January 15th, 2007 Ryan Jones
FEEDBUTTON
Have you noticed that the standard RSS links aren’t in my sidebar anymore? Instead they’ve been replaced with the little 
icon. It’s called FeedButton and it’s a website that I run.
Anyway… Today I released some new features for feedbutton. If you click on the button (the one in the sidebar), you’ll notice 2 new links at the bottom. The first one is a preview – it allows you to preview the rss fead, and presents you with some buttons to add it to your favorite readers.
The second is the stats button. This is the cool stuff. Here’s the stats for dotCULT’s new feed. You’ll see a preview of the feed at the top (and a link to add this feed to your reader of course). But then you’ll see the stats.
The first stat shows what readers your feed has been added to (the top 5), and the total number of readers subscribed to your feed.
The 2nd column uses Amazon style logic to show you the top 6 feeds that your readers also subscribe to. It works just like the “users who bought this product also bought these” type logic. For example, the feeds currently showing for dotCULT happen to be the old dotCULT rss feed, and 2 of my friend’s websites.  This makes sense considering I’ve added my feed and my friends, and they’ve added their feeds and mine.
For you privacy advocates out there, don’t worry. It’s not tracking any identifiable information about you at all.
So go check it out, and let me know if you have any comments, questions, or feature suggestions. I’ll be glad to listen to them.
Entry Filed under: Main
8 Comments
1. qureyoon | January 17th, 2007 at 11:08 pm
hm.. looks a lot like this one
2. Ryan | January 18th, 2007 at 10:38 am
That site appears to be conceptually different from feedbutton. It still looks like it adds a lot of clutter, or a plain HTML form type dropdown.
I’m not sure … but I also didn’t see any stats options.
Also… I’m not sure if it takes control of your feed URLs or not. On Feedbutton, the user never visits a feedbutton.com site when adding your feed (unlike feedburner which gets free page views out of your traffic) That’s the key difference I was going for here.
I let you keep your own traffic.
3. » FeedButton Adds S&hellip | January 18th, 2007 at 10:04 pm
[…] Now, FeedButton has made using it even more worth it, since they’ve apparently been tracking the stats of people who subscribed to my feed. I’m not sure if they disclosed it, but these stats are totally useful so I don’t mind any of it. My stats page shows a preview of your feed (useful for potential subscribers, as well as the link to a more advanced feed subscription page), lists the top 5 feed readers that have subscribed to your feed. My top 5: […]
4. Jacob Share | March 12th, 2007 at 10:45 am
Hey Ryan,
Nice work, I’m about to go generate my own button. Some improvements that I’d like to see include allowing us bloggers to:
1) choose which badges to have in the list
2) style the button to match our site
3) order the badges as we like
4) use our own button so we can e.g. use non-English text
5. Jacob Share | March 12th, 2007 at 11:31 am
After taking a look at your code, I realize that all my requested features already exist, if I’m willing to cache the js file locally and modify it to my heart’s content but continue forwarding subscription traffic through your site. Do you mind my doing that? If you mind my detailing it the way I just did, I suggest you block this comment and email me.
6. Ryan | March 12th, 2007 at 2:38 pm
Hey Jacob.. No go ahead and cache it, I don’t mind.
The only problem you’d have with that though is you won’t get any new features when I decide to add them. You also won’t get new readers, etc. So you’d have to check back every once in a while and make sure things are still working.
One of the main requests I get is to allow people to use their own button image, and I hope to have a variable set for that soon.
Another thing I’d like to do is multiple languages, however I would obviously need help translating it.
I’m in the process of moving it to a new server shortly though, so that comes first. Hopefully I can time some new features with the new server move.
As far as choosing the buttons, I’m not sure if that’s a feature I’d want to add. I’ll have to see what other people think. Part of the convience of feedbutton is that I automatically update the readers for you.
I monitor usage statisitics, and if nobody is using a certain reader, I tend to remove it. Also, if i get email requests to add a certain reader, I’m usually good about doing so as long as they show me an image I can use. (by the way, Google if you’re reading.. make me a standard image, yours is bigger than everybody elses and using a lot of my bandwith for the resized one)
7. Jacob Share | March 13th, 2007 at 9:01 am
You make some good points, Ryan. However, I’m more concerned about my site’s speed than having the latest features and if you continue announcing them on your blog, I’ll know when to consider upgrading. I’d rather spend some more time so that my users can save theirs. That’s why I’ll also cache the buttons, and wouldn’t want the list changing on me unexpectedly.
One tip – I would NOT introduce any new features with the server move, that’s already a big enough change in itself and if something goes wrong, you’ll have fewer possible culprits. Once you’re settled in, then rollout the new stuff. To generalize – big launches are bad, iterations are good 🙂
8. Jacob Share | March 14th, 2007 at 10:17 am
Hey Ryan,
I’ve put my customized FeedButton in place on http://jobmob.co.il/.
Take a look at feedbutton.js. I made quite a few changes:
1) I added comments giving you credit.
2) Whenever I see repetition, I always say to myself ‘there’s got to be a better way’, so I make more use of variables.
3) I removed the buttons that I didn’t need and changed the images and order to look more uniform.
4) I wanted a version that would break gracefully if the browser had Javascript disabled. It was either leave the button pointing to my feed’s url or have my title and the button disappear entirely (see my site, you’ll understand). I chose the latter since I already have other direct links to my feed only a few pixels away.
Thanks again, I’m looking forward to see what impact this will have on my subscription rate.