18/07: Feedburner FeedFlares Wordpress Plugins Nucleus Madness!

It's been a frustrating day here in the Cayman Islands but the causes of the frustration have at least given me a little something to blog about! 

Since becoming part of the Google empire there have already been some changes over at Feedburner. One of the most positive is that they have made the previously pro only stats available to all users. I finally decided to pop over and update all my feeds and have a play around with the new stats, and this is where the frustrations began..........

Modifying the Wordpress site over at TheCaymanHost.com was simple enough and I decided to add FeedFlare to the site as well as to the feed. This has always been possible, but now, inserting the FeedFlare code on your blog also triggers the collection of the stats, thus killing two birds with one stone. Pretty cool I thought - and it is. I then decided I would add my chosen FeedFlare to these pages as well and immediately ran into a problem. For some reason, which nobody over on the Feedburner Forums or the Nucleus Forums has yet managed to offer an answer. My code was all inserted and the stats reporting triggered fine, but, FeedFlare refuses to display on these pages. I am now on a quest to divine why, so I'll let you know as soon as I find out.

Naturally,in the course of my searching I started running across more questions and answers. Now, if you're like me you are a sucker for Wordpress plugins but there are so many of them and it's sometimes hard to stop........oh sad addiction. What got me started was the FeedFlare stats which just didn't tally with those of my server, so although I'd followed the instructions to the letter I was concerned that things weren't quite right. On a hunch I reckoned there must be a plugin to deal with FeedFlare and sure enough I came across an excellent one. You can download the Gregarious plugin at the Vacuous Virtuoso the site of the author, Ankur Kothari. Here you will also find a great deal of comments and help for the plugin should you need it. 

Feeling pleased with myself, I deleted the FeedFlare code, installed the Gregarious plugin and sure enough, there were my FeedFlares just as I wanted them. For a moment I was content and my Nucleus problem seemed minor irritation. 

I should have left well alone at that point but like so many I never listen to that inner voice. The Gregarious plugin is a pretty comprehensive social bookmarking plugin and although I was already using ShareThis on my Wordpress site, this is also included in Gregarious. So, I deleted ShareThis and activated it within the new plugin. Would it work? Would it hell. Not being a coder and unable to find a quick fix I disabled it and reinstalled the original stand alone - actually that's not quite true - I forgot to disable it and ended up with a conflict causing everything to go haywire. After deleting all the files from the server to cure the problem, I uploaded both plugins again and got them running happily alongside one another. Net result - a couple of hours of frustration and a site that looked no different to when I started but an extra plugin installed! I sure hope it fixes the stats glitches on Feedburner!!! 

As I am on the subject of Wordpress plugins, I came across another couple of useful ones yesterday (see, I can't leave them alone) which may be of interest to publishers using Kontera on their sites.  I found the Kontera Wordpress Plugin over at JohnChow.com and although I was already running their contextual ads, being the plugin junkie that we've established I am, I couldn't resist trying it. It works, and if you're not happy delving about in your blog's guts, it will certainly make for a very simple installation. 

While on the subject of Kontera, they usually apply quite tough guidelines on traffic levels of the sites they will work with, so, if you're only a small publisher you might like to check out JohnChow's post about his arrangements with Kontera to circumvent this in many circumstances. 

Finally, if you have heard of Sphinn.com or even if you haven't, it is a new social media site along the lines of Digg. It was launched last week by Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land and is aimed squarely at SEO types. Early signs are that it will be far more marketer friendly than Digg and yes, there is already a Sphinn Wordpress Plugin ready for you to use so that folks can share your greatest posts. 

TCH

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