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After all of the hubub this weekend about how FeedBurner is ‘trouble’ and ‘bad for us’, I wanted to make a quick note of a couple of ways to serve your feeds through FeedBurner in a way that makes it possible to easily and seamlessly bring your feeds back under your control at any time.

1. Use FeedBurner’s MyBrand service (which is now free) to serve your feeds using a domain you own. This lets you serve your feeds with a URI of http://feeds.mysillyblog.com/mysillyfeed or the like. In the event Google ‘preferring’ Google Reader for feeds burned by FeedBurner (something I’m confident Google will never do), you’d just point feeds.mysillyblog.com back to a server you control, and in the blink of a TTL, your feeds are yours again. For details on implementing MyBrand, check out Danny Sullivan’s great guide: Stay Master of Your Feed Domain.
2. Advertise your feed at a URL on your blog (http://mysillyblog.com/index.xml), then redirect users to FeedBurner with a 302 Found redirect. Straight from the HTTP specifications, this tells your browser or RSS reader:

   Since the redirection might be altered on occasion, the client SHOULD continue to use the Request-URI for future requests.

   Here’s a nice guide detailing how to properly redirect your feed to FeedBurner using a 302 Found response code. In this case, if Google / FeedBurner ever sins against you or your mother, your feeds can be instantly and seamlessly moved away from FeedBurner by removing this redirect.
3. For the extra paranoid, combine methods 1 and 2!

I’m a huge fan of FeedBurner, and like Fred Wilson, don’t share the concerns of Dave Winer about FeedBurner’s future. At last count, I manage around 225 feeds in several FeedBurner accounts, and don’t ever plan on going back. But, if the need arises, I take comfort in knowing how easy is is to leave. To quote Fred’s post:

That gives me all the comfort in the world. I love it when services make it easy to leave. When they do that, I tend to stay.

As my Firebug Screencast made it’s way around the web, I received quite a few comments and emails asking me how I made this screencast. I’ve put off responding to most of them, thinking that I’d make a screencast about making a screencast. The recursiveness of the meta-screecast is too much for me to handle, so I’ve given in. Here’s how I put my screencast together.

Tools

Spotlight Effect

To create the spotlight effect and highlight the mouse clicks and keypresses, I used Mouseposé from Boinx Software.

Screencast Software

To record the screen and voiceover, I used Snapz Pro X from Ambrosia Software. Update: I’ve since heard incredible things about ScreenFlow. It’s $99, but looks to be worth every penny.

Microphone

For this screencast, I used the internal mic on my Mac Book Pro in a quiet room. I initially planned on re-tracking the audio with an external mic I had laying around, but I was quite happy with how the sound turned out, and, frankly, was more interested in lunch than working on this screencast any longer. If you’re looking for pro sound, you’ll need an external mic. My buddy Ryan Irelan, who runs Podcast Free America, recommends these models:

• Kustom KM4 Mic with Cable
• Behringer XM8500 Microphone
• Shure SM58 Mic
• MXL MXL V63MBP Computer Desktop Recording Kit

If you go the re-tracking route, it might be worth your time to run your audio track through The Levelator. I’ve not used it personally, but I’ve heard great things.

Encoding

To re-encode the video produced by Snapz Pro X into H.264, I used Quicktime Pro. I chose Quickitme Pro for it’s ease of use and support of the Fast Start feature, which allows the movie to start playing before it’s been entirely downloaded. For those interested in the specific encoding parameters I used when exporting, here they are:

Process

1. Write a script. The public firebug screencast was probably take fifteen or so – the first ten of which I tried to do without a script. Let’s just say those ten takes included a good bit of French (in the “pardon my French” sort of way) as a result of my frustration. After I wrote a script, printed it out in large type, and set it by my monitor, things went much smoother.
2. Memorize the script. The next five tossed takes were the result of me not looking at the screen while I was recording the screencast, but rather looking at the script. Once the script is memorized, you’re free to focus on what’s happening on the screen.
3. Enunciate. If you’ve never recorded your voice for any published work, take a look at Ryan’s Training Your Voice for Podcasting guide. His tips are right on the money, especially this one: “Overcompensate. You’ll probably think you sound weird, but that’s when you’re doing it correctly.”
4. Go for it! Enable Mouseposé, invoke Snapz Pro X, and give it a whirl. Expect to repeat this step several times until you’re happy with the end result.
5. Publish. Compress your final take using Quicktime Pro, upload it to your favorite (preferably un-metered) webhost, and blog about it.

If any of you have any corrections, clarification, or additions that you’d like me to post, please post a comment below. I’m not a professional by any means – I’ve published one and only one screencast. If you make a screencast using this tutorial, I’d love it if you posted a link to your screencast in the comments as well.

So, what are you waiting for? Start working on your screencast!

Just a couple days ago Firebug 1.0 Beta was released, with loads and loads of new features. Roger Johansson calls it the web developer tool of the year:

With the recent release of Firebug 1.0 (beta – the old kind of beta, not a Web 2.0 eternal beta), this extension went from “great” to absolutely marvelous. A must have that no Web developer should do without. I’m serious – you need Firebug.

I absolutely agree. In the short time since it’s been released, I’ve used it to track down an obscure bug with Rails AJAX auto-completion helpers, debug the CSS on this blog, and inspect the AJAX behavior of Campfire to add new features to Marshmallow, the unofficial ruby Campfire API (look for a gem release soon!).

So, this morning, I did a short screencast demoing some of my favorite features of Firebug – some new in 1.0 Beta, and some there since the beginning. Here it is:

• Firebug 1.0 Beta Screencast

This is my first screencast, so go easy on me. :) Hope you enjoy!

I’m sick of expaining the difference between comments and trackbacks to people. For the last time:

Comments are comments are comments. Trackbacks are comments. Readers want to see what other people have to say about your post, they couldn’t care less if someone made the comment on your blog, blogged about it themselves, emailed it to you, or muttered it in their sleep.

In A Beginner’s Guide to TrackBack, Ben and Mena ramble for a bit and then get to the point and say:

“This is a form of remote comments.”

Separating comments to your posts in your blog’s UI into two lists, ‘Comments’ and ‘Trackbacks’ is confusing to the reader. In the pending redesign of this site, all comments will be displayed below their respective post in chronological order. No distinction will be made between the different types of comments, nor is such any distinction necessary. Let’s quit making blogging any more confusing than it should be.

In Mena Trott’s apologetic follow-up to her implosion at Les Blogs (video here) she poses a question to the blogosphere:

Is it possible to have the sort of productive face-to-face connection or conversation that Ben M. and I had offline in an online world? And what can we, as bloggers, do to facilitate that?

Here’s my take, Mena:

Yes, it is possible to have deep, exciting, terrifying, enlightening, and (most of all) productive conversations online. I’ve had many.

How do bloggers facilitate this? I’m sure not we all can: to facilitate the spread of productive conversation, bloggers must lead by example. This, in my mind, requires four things:

1. Being able to respecfully, productively communicate in person
2. Believing that we can conduct a similarly productive repore on the intraweb
3. Taking care and caution to stip the non-productive bits from your online communication (this post was a great excersize of item #3), and lastly
4. Taking even greater care when reponding to criticism, or to ideas or opinions you disagree with.

I, for a start, pledge to behave reasonably and productively in all off- and on-line discussion regarding this issue. I believe that I can. I believe we all can.

Thoughts, anyone?

Wow. From my freshly updated Google Analytics stats, we have my US visits breakdown by state:

Amazing! Georgia’s my #1 state, with Montana at #2 and New York and California tied for 3rd.

Funny Google should release this during sweeps, the portion of the year in which TV stations run feature news packages and show lame flicks like Category 6 in hopes that Nielsen’s minions will scribble about them in their journal.

Google Analytics makes a real mockery of what TV stations pay Nielsen so much for. These are the real numbers, not samples.

This now allows web publishers to provide detailed target market information to advertisers without paying expensive market research companies. Provided with this thorough information from internet media entities, advertising agencies will be much more confident spending money on internet ads.

The returns from Google Analytics won’t come instantly, but when they do, they’ll come as many more Adwords subscribers, and by establishing the internet as the premier advertising format.

There’s so much more to Analytics than this – the ‘Goal’ idea is quite interesting. You can assign dollar amounts to a page navigation sequence – say, from an item page, to checkout, to a shipping confirmation page – and then break down which segment of visitors is ordering the most wigits or confirming their conference attendance.

There’s even advanced regex filter support (for people who understand what the hell that means =] ). I can’t say enough. If you have any sort of website, from blog to e-commerce-mega-site, sign up for Google Analytics. It’s flipping amazing.

I swear Google is stealing my ideas. I had a frustrating experience with the industry standard webstats package, Urchin, last night, and complained to a couple people about it.

This morning, I awake to a new Google product, Google Analytics, which is the result of Google purchasing Urchin a while back. On the Analytics home page is a bulleted list detailing Google’s solution to every one of my gripes with Urchin. Fishy, eh? :)

However, a stats package can’t really be evaluated until it has data in it. Here’s how it looks right now:

Pretty impressive! I especially like the “Executive Overview” idea, as well as the Geo Map! Check back soon, I’ll post an updated screenshot with some real numbers.

So it seems the two largest suppliers of enterprise education software have become one. Blackboard has purchased WebCT for $180 million cash. I’m a college student that uses both tools daily, and the most positive thing I can say about this is: possibly future students won’t have to remember that their Econ homework is in WebCT, but assignments for my Systems Development class are on Blackboard, they’ll both be in the unwieldingly huge and difficult to use BlackboardCT Ack.

Further, both tools are compeletely sub-par. Let me tell you why.

One thing that I like to do with websites: I use bookmarks. A lot of people use bookmarks, say, to store the address of an important site (like an Econ assignment page) so they can access it with one click.

What happens when I try to bookmark my Econ assignment page, and load in in WebCT? WebCT prompts me to login, which I happily do. Then, I’m redirected to myWebCT, WebCT’s fancy-scmancy dashboard page. I didn’t want myWebCT. I wanted Econ! No such luck. Don’t even get me started about WebCT’s file download links.

On to Blackboard, apparently the bigger fish of the two companies. Would you like to login to Blackboard? I’ve used this new-fangled technology called “bookmarks” to store the login page for easy, one-click access right here. If you’re registerd with Terry, try to login.You’ll be suprised to see a strange error message:

Challenge token null

Challenge what? Try again and it works. Or, you could use visit Terry’s Blackboard homepage, NOT the login page itself, then click on the login button, and you’ll see no such inflamitory remarks about your tokens.

Further, neither tool has ANY sort of notification system. That is, I frequently get e-mails from my professors saying “I’ve added a new assignment to WebCT/Blackboard.” This seems to me like a common task: upload new content, then notify a list of contacts. But software that automates mundane, repetative tasks? Alas, that just makes too much sense. RSS feeds would be perfect for this, but really, who am I kidding.

Anyway, I’m glad to be using both WebCT and Blackboard for my last semester. I hope they’re happy together as one huge educational software conglomerate. Maybe then they’ll take a second to develop software that doesn’t require huge manuals and trainings for instructors and headaches for students. Here’s my plea:

Oh BlackboardCT, or whatever you would like to be called, great software conglomerate, I bow before you and ask of you only this: would you please write software that helps students learn rather than requires them to learn how to use it? Oh Blackboard CT, next time around, help teachers teach and don’t make more work for them by requiring them to attend lenghty trainings. BlackboardCT, please heed my call.

Really, it’s all insignificant. In 5 years we’ll all be wirelessly connected together and to the Library of Congress via our BrainChips™. I’m all for that, as long as BlackboardCT isn’t in charge.

That is all.