Feedburner is a website that provides RSS feed management services. What the heck is that? Well let me tell you. Feedburner has several services that are free, while several more are on a paid basis. They all help you promote your blog or in this case your Xomba space. They also have an advertising network that can be utilized for a price. All you need to do is sign up for a free account and get to work. The first thing you’ll need to do is input your writing space of course so it knows where to find it and what to look at. Remember all of these tools are for the RSS feed, remote feed, of your space here. It will not do much on the site but it may help you get noticed out in the blogosphere as they call it. Surprisingly the site has no search function or even a directory of its users, how useless is that. On the main screen for your blog (it’s shorter than Xombyte, etc…) will be five tabs: Analyze, Optimize, Publicize, Monetize and Troubleshootize…

• Analyze - This tab gives you usage stats for your blog like who is subscribed, how many hits you’ve had and more intense stats, but those are a pay option.
• Optimize - This is the most useful tab right from the get go. Here you can use their tools to do things like get the feedburner icon you’ve seen some users using here. You can check out what the RSS feed of your blog looks like from the:
• Your Feed button. This will show you what the plain RSS feed is pushing out first and foremost.
• Browser-Friendly - There are a few options here that will help your feed be properly formatted in many browsers including Mozilla, Firefox, Camino, IE 5-6, Opera and Safari. (IE7 and Firefox will see it in a similar fashion). You can choose to show just the titles of your posts or a teaser like on the My Xombytes page. There are really only two themes to choose from.
• Smartcast - This is basically only useful if you are podcasting. Since we don’t support that feature yet it won’t do much good for your Xombytes, but it might be useful if you have a podcast blog elsewhere.
• SmartFeed - This transforms your feed into a compatible format for any feed reader on-the-fly, which I’m not really sure about.
• FeedFlare - This option allows your feed to have links built into it for commenting, emailing, digging, adding to delicious and voting. It’s quite useful, but Xomba already supplies many of the options for you on the site so they are redundant.
• Link Splicer - This will take your links from several popular linking sites (like del.icio.us and Digg) and will inject them in between your blog posts. This will only work for your external feed is people link to it through feedburner. If you are Digging or deli’ing your posts then they will show up as doubles of the actual posts. Not very useful for us here in my opinion.
• Photo Splicer - This does the same thing but for photos you upload to one of the popular photo sharing sites like Flickr.
• Geotag your feed - This will add a geographical location to your blog feed. I don’t really know the relevance of it or the usefulness. I suppose if someone were looking for a dog food expert in the back forty of Montana and that happened to be you then it might be useful, otherwise it’s just fluff I think.
• Feed Image Burner - This adds a dash of color to your feed by inserting an image into it. Again, fluff more than anything I think.
• Title/Description Burner - If you have something uninteresting as a title or non-descriptive, this will allow you to change it in your feed. Again, not for the Xomba.com site itself but for external people who come across your feed.
• Convert Format Burner - This will convert your feed into one of the most popular formats for feed reading software, either RSS 2.0 or Atom1.0. I would suggest using RSS 2.0 here.
• Content-type Burner - This is not really important and can be left alone. If you’re really interested you’ll need to be familiar with some of the more technical specs of RSS and Atom.
• Summary Burner - This basically lets you leave some small message at the end of the teaser for each post you have in your feed. It’s fluff personally, I mean everyone knows that to read the rest of a post they need to click on it and visit the site.
• Tickerize - This will automatically pop a stock ticker into your feed, useful if you’re talking about dollars, stocks and companies. Not useful at all if you’re not.
• Amazon ID Burner - if you have an affiliate account with Amazon and you happen to mention items that are available on the site in your posts then this will insert your affiliate code into links. Remember, this is for the feed and not on Xomba. If you wanted to do it on Xomba you would need to add the links and your code manually.
• Publicize - This is where you can start attracting readers to your posts. Several tools are here including:
• Buzzboost - BuzzBoost republishes your burned feed's content as go-anywhere HTML. This gives you a snippet of code you can post into any site you post and promote your blog on.
• Headline Animator - This is the cool box you’ve seen here on Xomba in some people’s signatures. It flips through the last few posts titles in their xombytes, really rather cool. There are two versions, the one you see here and another for email specific signatures. They both look cool (I actually private messaged myself on Xomba to check it out.) When I emailed myself at hotmail, Yahoo, Gmail and my other account none of them worked right. So I can’t really suggest you use it for email. Now forum posts on the other hand…it might be really great.
• Ping Shot - Alerts the blog directories, like Technorati, that you have updated your blog. This will get your posts updated on their sites quicker. Can be quite handy if you have time-sensitive posts. Feedburner will do the updating for you.
• Email Subscriptions - This would give you the ability to have an email form for people to subscribe to your updates. I don’t think it will work with Xomba. If it does I think you’d have to drop it into every post manually.
• FeedCount - Well this would tell you and everyone else how many people are or aren’t reading your blog. Of course if you only have 1 subscriber I would wait until you hit double or triple digits or it might just look ad. Just my opinion of course
• The rest of the mumbo-jumbo on that tab is either really techincal and would require some reading and thought or is really simple and you can figure it out in a second or two. So I’m done with that.

• Monetize - It takes money to make money and that’s what this requires...money.
• Troubleshootize - Having problems? Find the answers there.

So in the end some of it is quite cool and some is quite useless. With this quick guide you should be able to navigate through their site and get the cool things working. You can drop the animated headlines in your signature on your Xomba profile and it will work both the fancy one and the email one...I checked! Next time we’ll talk about some of the Blog Directories and Search Engines.

PoisedGuru