Feedburner: Adding Flattr to your FeedFlare (Part: 2)

This is a follow up to my previous post: Feedburner: Adding Flattr to your FeedFlare.

I've been wrestling around with FeedBurner's FeedFlare API for a few nights now. Most notably I've had trouble getting some of the documented xPath functions to work, and dealing with what appears to be delays in updating the flare after you add it.

My goal was to add categories to the DynamicFlare href so you could pass those along to Flattr. The problem is that if you add something like ${a:category[1]/@term} to the href, and a:category[1] doesn't exist in your feed, it will not add the flare to your feed (sort of like a filter if the attribute proves false()).

In a final decision of anger, I decided to drop any passing of information from the DynamicFlare href other than the feedUrl. This in itself proved difficult, since ${feedUrl} doesn't work as advertised. I instead opted to pass ${a:link[@rel="self"]/@href} which appears to work on my feed. YMMV.

I've gotten rid of the files I linked to in my last post so people don't use them. For the quick and dirty, here's the URL to use for Personal FeedFlare now:

http://www.swissdisk.com/~bcollins/feedflare/flattr-me-dynamic-v2.php

There are two options you can pass to this script:

• uid: Your Flattr UID (required)
• lng: Your preferred language (defaults to en_GB, aka English)

I used this for mine:

http://www.swissdisk.com/~bcollins/feedflare/flattr-me-dynamic-v2.php?uid=17833&lng=en_GB

That's it! The new script will parse the feed in the second script and pass up to 980 characters as the desc, up to 80 characters of the title and all of the categories as tags.

You can also check here for all the PHP-Source files so you can modify to your liking.