Fedafi - Wordpress Plugin for RSS

Okay after a great deal of sweat (equity) we’ve released the new version of Fedafi. With a whole new bunch of features.

As well as being able to create, manage, market and track RSS feeds Fedafi now just just as good a job with feeds created elsewhere.

You can now style and track your blogs RSS feed right on your own site, no need to use someone else’s domain name. Just enter your feed URL and you’ll get it styled, with full instructions to all visitors on how they can use the feed, including one click subscribe buttons for Pageflakes, Netvibes, My Yahoo, My Google, Windows Live and Excite Mix.

The cool stuff doesn’t stop there. As well as tracking subscribers to your blog feed it will also track clicks on every outbound link. This means you can see which articles, headlines and links are popular. Giving you the metrics to fine tune your blogging content.

Take a look at a Wordpress blog feed thats been Fedafi’d here.

For those who don’t want to, or don’t have a website to install Fedafi on we have released a hosted version. You can use a sub-domain of a generic RSS domain name that we supply or use your own domain name at no extra cost.

All in all Fedafi puts control of your RSS back in your hands.

On Tuesday I was lucky enough to attend Second Chance Tuesday a networking event in London to bring together entrepreneurs, investors and others under one roof. Guest speaker was Saul Klein who is currently VP, ecommerce for Skype. Saul gave a really good presentation based on his insights from starting Video Island.

This was a technology event, full of entrepreneurs from the technosphere, as I mingled and talked to the people it became clear to me that a whole lot of RSS evangelising has to be done.

Today I came accross Niall Kennedy’s post regarding Nielsen//NetRatings new study, a three page version can be downloaded here. This goes somewhat to confirm the confusion :

40% of Britons receive automatic news feeds to their browser or desktop but 69% had never heard of Really Simple Syndication

Doesn’t add up does it? As a technology RSS isn’t understood, but RSS is being consumed. However, 42% knew what podcasting is and a further 35% knew what it is.

The reason for this is that RSS is really different. Email was lucky, it was just an electronic version of the mail system, you write a letter, address it to some one, send it to the post office and it gets delivered. RSS isn’t so lucky as to have something to directly compare it to.

This really shows the importance of having ‘add to yahoo’ and ‘add to google’ chicklets for your feed, people understand this and what to do, RSS they may not.

Later this week we will be releasing the latest version of Fedafi complete with an inline ajax media uploader.

Built inline with the new post page the uploader allows you to upload image and media files then just drag them into the input box to use. All inline, no page refresh no loss of data already inputted on the page.
More soon.

We have just launched a video blog at http://vlog.fedafi.com

The vlog will cover news about Fedafi, input from Fedafi users and general news and events happening in the RSS and Podcasting world.

You can subscribe through iTunes here

At present you can watch me talking about the birth of Fedafi and a short vidoe from a Fedafi user.

Topshop, UK high street fashion outlet have just launched their first podcast - cool stuff!

This is a ‘down the line’ marketing use and great to see their extension into podcasting, issue 1 is very TV advertising influenced but getting some good reviews over at iTunes:

Great idea…fab idea…these podcast things are fab

However it seems their approach isn’t perfect yet, biggest complaints seem to be:

• Too fast
• No prices

The too fast complaint is however qualified with ‘I had to watch it a few times’ - I guess Topshop won’t complain about that too much

Go straight to the itunes feed here.

Okay so you’ve got a podcast feed, now you need to tell the world and iTunes is a good place to start.

First thing to get on with is getting a .mac account, without it you can’t add a podcast to iTunes. However, you can do this during the add process, be aware you’ll need a credit card handy as iTunes requires one to create an account.

Let’s get started. First thing to do is fire up iTunes and hit the ‘Music Store’ link in the left panel, you’ll now see a menu like this:

Click the ‘Podcasts’ link and you’ll now see this:

Hit the ‘Submit Podcast’ link. Now you’ll see this screen which asks for the URL of your podcast feed.

Add in your URL and hit ‘Continue’

NOTE: At this point you’ll be asked for your .mac account details and given the chance to create one if you don’t have one.

You’ll be given the chance to view your podcast details and then you are done. Apple will send you a few emails, review your podcast feed and as long as the content meets their specification you’ll be added and then you’ll see your feed in iTunes, like this:

You can check out our documentation podcast feed in itunes by clicking here.

I stumbled across Horse Power, the blog of marketing agency Twelve Horses today and a couple of posts are really worth taking a look at. First Why do search engines love blogs makes the point about RSS:

RSS - Blogs have RSS feeds. Search engines are paying more attention to RSS feeds as they provide a clear and concise version of the content without any old school SEO tricks. An RSS feed contains the post’s date, title, full or abbreviated text, tags, enclosures and other relevant information. They can’t be faked with a ton of keywords in the sites presentation or meta data.

Of course this applies to all RSS feeds, not just those attached to blogs.

The second article links through to a step by step of a campaign they did that includes social media, worth a look at here if for nothing more than watching the Diggnation podcast.

Frank Gruber at Somewhat Frank points to Zach Braff’s (Scrubs) blog and to Zach’s RSS blimp. Zach seems to be embracing social media and also has his own MySpace page. Zach’s new movie The Last Kiss has a really neat podcast featuring ‘a day in the life’ worth a watch.

If you hit the site you may find it difficult to find the podcast feed, I did, in fact I couldn’t find it, maybe I’m getting old and stupid and need to stop using a magnifying glass to read the screen and get some real glasses, anyhoo grab the feed from this URL

http://www.lastkissmovie.com/podcast/podcast_last_kiss.xml

It includes Rachel Bilson (The OC) washing her dog “Thurman Murmen” which just has to mean something to someone.

Today we launched the branded version of our RSS generator to the world. Up to now we have been using the company name Stream Distribution but as we have the nice new logo and the website finished it’s time to unleash it!
Fedafi. Pronounced fee·da·fi (’fi’ as in hifi).

The new site includes v1.0.3 of our software which includes complete tracking for all podcast media and the re-introduction of the free Lite version.

We are still working on the site so watch out for any glitches, a full press launch will follow shortly.

Today we released version 1.0.2 of Stream Distribution with some great new features, including:

• Podcast feeds now come with css and xsl files making them web viewable
• Items in podcast feeds can now be tracked

This means you can now track exactly how many downloads you get of each and every podcast.

The css and xsl files are similar to normal RSS feeds and you can edit both to style your feed.

To upgrade from v1.0.1 to v1.0.2 just grab the StreamD-upgrade-v1-0-1-to-1-0-2.zip from the downloads section. Upload it’s contents to the root folder of your install.

Inside the RSS folder of the zip file you will see a file called htaccess.txt, open this and copy the two lines in there into your own .htaccess file in the rss folder of your install.

Any problems drop by the forum.