Since some time we are publishing the Alba Berlin basketball news that we are collecting on FANtasy Rotation also via an RSS feed from Feedburner. “So what is Feedburner?” someone may ask. Effectively it is just a little tool on the web that ones was independent and now belongs to Google. What it does: It takes your feed (yes you already have to have one) and republishes it while adding some additional features to it. I think the following pictures visualizes it pretty well.

Some advantages that using Feedburner entails over published the RSS feed yourself are:

• Less traffic costs for your own RSS feed
• Automatic visitor counter and analysis
• Multiple other services (Embeddable HTML code, Email Subscription, Headline Animator, …)

Wait a minute? Headline Animator? What is that?
I actually never really checked out any of the Feedburner features besides visitor counter. So I played around a bit with the Headline Animator feature and produced the two little widget like things that you see below. The first one is more ore less the default template while in the second one I am using a custom background. This offers another nice way of embedding your RSS feed in a smaller form in other websites or even your email signature (although I would consider the later at least annoying, almost Spam).

As you see there are some minor problems with displaying the date correctly in the 2nd version - at least right now, maybe not when you look at it as it is dynamic content - but I am not so bothered about that as I don’t want to use it for any production environment.

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

↑ Grab this Headline Animator

Link List
FANtasy Rotation
Feedburner
↑ Grab this Headline Animator
↑ Grab this Headline Animator