If you’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.9 like me, you might have found that the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin recommended by Google and Feedburner has now stopped working. In fact, I couldn’t even upload it to a new site which hasn’t been upgraded to 2.9.
There’s been no word from Feedburner about this (No surprise, since their original Feedsmith plugin page itself returns an error and they appear to have taken a vow of silence since being acquired by Google).
Luckily some of the other Feedburner plugins work with 2.9. I’m currently using and recommending the FD Feedburner plugin by John Watson. Just install the plugin, enter your Feedburner feed address (The options are under the plugin menu), and you’re done.
(Note, the redirect may not go into action until you make a new post after installing the plugin – but if you create a test post and then delete it, it seems to work fine)
Power your blog or website comments with Twitter
Now this is interesting, as I’m a firm believer that much of the power of Twitter comes from external applications – and that even monetising Twitter could be unlocked by the ways it can be used outside of the current website.
Chirrup is an application which allows you to utilise Twitter for your comments. Simply put, everyone can message you via Twitter, Chirrup fetches all the replies and sorts them by url (So you can have a different feed for each page), and you can then display it however you desire.
It’s slightly more complicated than just copying a widget – but no more than installing a WordPress plugin. It also caches message locally, and goes through your personal replies rather than the public feed – helping speed. And funnily enough, it’s also available as a Chirrup WordPress plugin. There’s a developer blog, here, for more.