MSDN Social Bookmarks: FeedBurner Flare

Dan Rigsby — Thu, 11 Sep 2008 19:30:41 +0000

MSDN Social Bookmarks is now up and running. Previously I had asked if someone could write a FeedBurner Flare item and IE 8 Accelerator for this site. Well, Katrien De Graeve beat me to the IE 8 Accelerator, but I think I am the first to have a FeedFlare item built…

REST API format for adding a new Bookmark

Base Url: http://social.microsoft.com/en-us/action/create/s/E/

QueryString Parameter	Description
url	The url to the bookmark
ttl	The title of the bookmark
d	The description of the bookmark

MSDN Social Bookmark FeedFlare

Here is what I have so far for a FeedFlare item for MSDN Social Bookmarks. As the REST API opens up more, I will try to add more to this.

FeedFlare URL:
http://www.danrigsby.com/Files/MSDNBookmark.xml

Source:

DOCTYPE FeedFlareUnit SYSTEM "FeedFlareUnit-1.0.dtd">
<FeedFlareUnit>
    <Catalog>
        <Title>Bookmark on MSDN SocialTitle>
        <Description>Add a link as a bookmark on MSDN Social.Description>
    Catalog>
    <FeedFlare>
        <Text>Bookmark on MSDN SocialText>
        <Link href="http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/action/create/s/E/?url=${link}&ttl=${title}&d=${title}"/>
    FeedFlare>
FeedFlareUnit>

Note:

You can adjust the URL in the link node to hit any of the 4 Microsoft bookmark sites:

http://social.msdn.microsoft.com

http://social.technet.microsoft.com

http://social.expression.microsoft.com

http://social.microsoft.com

How to use the FeedFlare

To use the FeedFlare item, you need to have a FeedBurner account. This account is free and easy to setup, just register here: https://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/register. Once you have your account, add your feed to the list. On the main feed page click the “Optimize” tab and select the “FeedFlare” link to the left:

Once you have done this you can select which items you would like to appear at the bottom of each feed item (blog post) or at the bottom of each blog post on your site by selecting the corresponding checkboxes. If you choose to add this to your blog site, you will have to setup your blog to pull the flare. Documentation for this is provides on Feedburner’s site.

To add the MSDN Social Bookmarks FeedFlare item, you will need to add a custom flare. If you scroll down this page you will see a textbox where you can enter in a link to a FeedFlare xml file. Just copy in the url: http://www.danrigsby.com/Files/MSDNBookmark.xml and click “Add New Flare” button.

Once this is done, you will see the new FeedFlare item in your list, and you can check the corresponding checkboxes to display it on your feed or site.

What it looks like

If you add the FeedFlare to your blog site, this is what the link looks like:

If you add the FeedFlare to your feed, this is what the link looks like in Google Reader:

When the link is clicked the url of the bookmark is set and the title and description are prepopulated with the feed item’s name. You can modify these values and tag the bookmark before saving it.

Enhancements

I would love to see the following features added once more of the REST API is opened up (or revealed) for MSDN Bookmarks:

A count of how many people have bookmarked the same link.
A list of the tags used to bookmark the link. (ordered by most used tag)