Space talkin’

Yesterday the folks from Google received a call from Anousheh Ansari, the first female private space explorer.  Among the things she says is missing on the international space station: internet access.  You would think that if you were in outerspace you’d have better things to do than watch the strangest video I’ve ever seen on Youtube.  I don’t really know what it would cost to get broadband in space, but you can’t really put a price on smiley dancing Indian midgets.

UPDATE: I just discovered that Anousheh has a blog going that is one of the most popular blogs on the net right now.  How in the heck is she blogging with no net access?  Maybe she has a secretary here on earth to whom she’s dictating her posts.

Talk about good service…Feedburner to the rescue!

Evidently someone from Feedburner read my post about my feed problems earlier and then left me a note when I solved it and offered assistance with any future problems.  All this without me even asking Feedburner for help officially!  That’s pretty cool.  I salute you, kind sir!

I’ve heard some people bash Feedburner in the past, most notably Todd Cochrane from Geek News Central.  He contends that you should never entrust your feed with a third party.  Maybe he has a point if you’re an uber-geek and know all about managing and creating RSS feeds on your own, but for a guy like me, Feedburner is vital.  Think about it: I just completely changed blogging platforms and was able to seemlessly maintain the RSS feed I’ve always used so most subscribers wouldn’t even know the difference.  This is the equivalent of being able to change cell phone companies but still keep your same number.  By using Feedburner, I didn’t have to call a million people and let them know I changed my number, so to speak (even though I actually only have 14 subscribers as of the time of this post, you get the picture).  Hey, if it’s good enough for Mike Arrington, who now has over 100k subscribers, it’s good enough for me.

I’m so glad I started using Feedburner right from the time I started blogging last year, even though at the time I didn’t really know how it would be useful for me.  I think originally I just wanted to put a cool little RSS chicklet on my site.  How fortuitous that it ended up helping me out big time.

Analogy Time

Brady Quinn:Quarterback:Ty Willingham:Charlie Weis::Butter:Blog Author:Blogger:WordPress

Feed problem solved!

Well, here’s a relief: all I had to do was clear my browser’s cache and we’re all good.  The feed works, so enjoy!

Feed Problems

Ok, so I migrated everything over from Blogger to WordPress last night.  No problem!  Today I check my feed to make sure everything is working right, and low and behold it is not!  I changed the original site feed in my Feedburner account to the new WordPress feed, which should work like a charm.  But here’s the funny thing:

If I check the feed using the normal RSS 2.0 protocol in my feed reader (I use Sage with Firefox), it only brings up old stuff off of the Blogger account (along with my old site description, etc.).  However, if I click on either the My Yahoo or Google Reader buttons to add the feed, those show it as updated with the WordPress content.  Is that strange or what?

This means that if you read Butter’s Podcast only via the feed in an RSS reader other than Yahoo or Google, you don’t even know that I’ve moved the site yet, and consequently aren’t reading this post (for some reason my last post on Blogger isn’t showing up in the feed either).

I’ve tried everything I know how to do on Feedburner’s end.  I’ve pinged several times and resynched twice, but it’s not working.  This is really weird.  I’ll keep you posted.

Sore losers

You knew John L. would find something to whine about. What a classless jerk.

Another cool feature - RSS Widget

Just discovered another cool feature of WordPress.  If you look down in the sidebar below the Flickr section, you’ll see some RSS feeds along with the five latest posts to each of them.  That’s kind of neat.  These feeds are ones that I read all the time, and would recommend that you subscribe to as well.