My Flare Smith Plugin, reached a new milestone today: v0.17. This version fleshes out the functionality to support new school AdSense enabled feeds, but also supports the popular My Brand feature which allows you to mask feeds.feedburner.com URLs with your own domain name. Version 0.17 also sports a shiny new options page that should be a little easier to use, especially now that there are 3 distinct settings that must be manipulated, depending on your needs, to get Flare Smith up and running.
There is one caveat though. The AdSense enabled feed support is a little wonky, but of no fault of my own.
You see, Google is just now rolling “Adsense for Feeds” out to replace the previous Ad offering “FeedBurner Ad Network” (or FAN). They manually moved FAN users (by request) to the new service, and have since stopped accepting new transfer requests. However, it appears that the Google has not completed its borg assimilation of the FeedBurner service. You can burn NEW feeds from your Ad Sense account – but they show up on a new feedburner.google.com account management page, which they don’t mention anywhere. With enough clicking you’ll find a ‘View Feed Stats’ link on the AdSense Setup > Manage Ads page. Your adsense account will log you in to this new page. Once in, you can activate FeedFlare as normal and configure its settings. However there is one thing they forgot to do: enable the page that outputs the FeedFlare JavaScript!
FeedFlare delivery is pretty simple – you insert a script block on the page with a URL that looks something like this:
<script src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~s/xentek?i=<?php the_permalink() ?>" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script>
If you visit the URL of this script in your browser (striping off the ?i= query string value), you’ll get the real output, which is a bit of JavaScript that inserts the tracking code for stats, and looks something like this:
if( typeof(FBSiteTrackerUri) == "undefined" || typeof(FBSiteTrackerURI) == "unknown" ) {
var FBSiteTrackerUri = "xentek";
document.write('');
}
However, if you try this same trick on a new school, AdSense enabled feed you’ll get a 404 – Page Not Found. It seems like a simple mistake to make, but one that is taking a while (the service has been out since May 30, 2008) for them to fix. There is also no easy way, except in the FeedBurner Support Forums (hosted on google groups) to complain. And unlike the FB Forums of yore, there is no one from FeedBurner (or google) who mans these forums and answers questions. I love the FeedBurner service, and totally got why FB was such a great buy for Google (New platform for AdSense, Integrating feed stats into Google Analytics), but it seems like the first fruits of this acquisition are very sour indeed. And I’m not alone.
WIth that said, there is no harm in using this plugin with the new Adsense enabled feeds. It just won’t do anything useful, yet. When google finally comes around and fixes this, Flare Smith will already be there, ready to go.
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