Nerve Endings Firing Away

It has been a hectic day; most of it spent on my laptop tweaking the new DesiPundit design. Of course, I’m not the least qualified to tinker around with code and I leave that up to the experts. The new automated syndication feature for DesiPundit has run into trouble and the mish-mash of categories is creating problems. The only solution right now is to auto-pull in the posts from the syndicated members and re-categorize them so that they fall in the right places. Thankfully, WordPress 2.7 has a quick edit feature that makes it really easy and convenient. But that’s not the end of the story.

Adding customized category or tag feeds from individual bloggers on different platforms using hazaar feed-modifying plugins like FeedBurner is the most pain-staking task. I’ve a modified FeedBurner Redirect plugin (holler if you need it) that lets you extract category feeds but strangely not tag feeds. Ever since I lost access to my FeedBurner account (long story), I’ve disabled it on this blog and honestly haven’t missed it much. So for my blog, you can get feeds for any possible category or tag or even a customized feed that excludes certain categories. So why use FeedBurner? To get your subscriber count? Or animated headlines? Or Adsense in your feed? For now, I think I can survive without FeedBurner.

But of course, it isn’t my job to convince bloggers out of using FeedBurner because it makes my job easier. Fortunately, bloggers are an accommodating lot and often prompt with requests. A flurry of emails later, the category feed is set up and is churning out selected posts. Blogspot blogs have a strange looking feed for their labels but once you are aware of it, it makes creating them a no-brainer. It is only the non-WordPress or non-Blogspot blogs that are a problem.

So I was talking about my yesterday. Each time I thought I would wrap it and close the lid on my laptop, another email used to pop up in my inbox with their category URL and off I would go through the motions of entering it in my spreadsheet, adding it to the syndication list, and check for new posts. But would it surprise you if I said I quite enjoy it?

Of course, not all bugs are squashed yet but every time the techies squash one, I learn something new. Probably one day I will be doing the squashing. Until then I can be only thankful to them.

PS. one of my new year resolutions is to blog more regularly and frequently than I’ve been over the past few weeks. This resolution might actually be realized than trying to get back in shape.