In order to tap the potential for Google Adsense for Feeds, I decided to move to Google’s feedproxy service.

As a result, our feed url has changed. The old feed url has been deleted and is currently being redirected. If you are subscribed to my FeedBurner feed, then please update your feed reader.

The URL to subscribe to is http://ajaydsouza.com/feed/. Subscribing to this URL will ensure that any updates at our end will not affect you.

If you prefer to receive feed updates via email then please use the following form:

About a week back I created a new feed that collates five of my feeds. This was done with the help of FeedBlendr. It is a good service, but there is a lot of room for improvement. The feed work but it seemed to give a problem with Feedburner.

I decided to give Yahoo! Pipes a shot as I originally intended to. The interface is easy to use but it doesn’t look at all welcoming. I haven’t let a single interface to this date benumb and I don’t intend to let Yahoo! Pipes be the first!

Got down to understanding how Yahoo! Pipes actually works and I was shocked to realize that it was actually really really easy to mix my feeds together!

All you need is a single Fetch module into which you feed in the locations of all your feeds. The output of this module is then sent to your Output module. You save and publish your pipe and you’re done!

I next got the RSS for the pipe and modified the Feedburner feed to point to this new RSS feed.

The result is a faster and possibly more reliable interface. Easy customization in case I wish to add or remove feeds. I’m sure I can do a lot more like limiting the number of articles and so on, but will take a bit more trial.

Have you tried out Yahoo! Pipes so far?

I’ve been pondering about a way to offer a single feed that will take into account all the different feeds that I publish.

Planet Ajay

I’ve been searching for services that offer this but will confess I’ve been largely unsuccessful. I ran across Feedblendr which aims at establishing just that.

I’ve combined the following feeds:

• Main Blog Feed
• Comments Feed
• Podcast
• Ajay on WordPress
• Support Forum

The new feed is served by Feedburner as usual and I’ve chosen to call it Planet Ajay. It’s also set to auto-discovery, so you’re browser or feed reader can pick it up.

Planet Ajay is perfect for readers who are subscribed to all my feeds. This eliminates the need for you to track several feeds.

I’m still looking for a better option than Feedblendr, because its refresh rate is slow. Do you have any suggestions for a better service?

Bye Bye MBL widget

I’ve also knocked off the MyBlogLog recent visitors widget for my community. I really like the widget, but MBL has become a lot slower than the early days and the widget has been really slowing down the loading of the page.

I may add the widget back in the future, but as of now it is knocked off. I’ve still maintained the code that will display the MBL Avatar next to your comment as that wasn’t too much of a problem (yet).

Suggest

I’m still looking for suggestions to improve visitor experience on the site. I’ve cut down on images to speed up the site, made more feeds available and have also ensured your comments count!

What is it that you find missing out here?
Do you have any suggestions for improvement? What can I do to make your visit here more memorable (in the good way) and what do I do to keep you coming back?

Waiting to hear your comments.

There seems to be a problem with Feedburner on this site. All my feeds are throwing up a 500 error. I’ve written to their support team and am expecting a reply.

I’ve removed the redirect from the .htaccess and it hasn’t solved the problem as well.

So, if you are subscribed to http://ajaydsouza.com/feed/ then you should continue to see this site normally.

If you are subscribed via the direct feedburner link, I request you to change the same to http://ajaydsouza.com/feed/.

Once, things are resolved with Feedburner, I will put back the redirect.

Update: Seems to have resolved itself. I’ve put the updates back. Do let me know if you face a problem again.

The feed from the WordPress category of this blog, titled Ajay On WordPress has now been added to planet WordPress

This category has already been devoted to all posts related to WordPress and now I have decided to make a devoted feed for it.

You can also subscribe to the feed directly from my subscribe page.

I have been deliberating doing this for a while now. I haven’t updated Humble Reviews for a few months now.

With so little time on hand it became really difficult to maintain multiple sites, especially one which requires you to constantly update. I still watch several movies a week and would love to review them, however writing high quality reviews for every movie isn’t always possible and sadly, isn’t always the priority.

Additionally, requests sent out for users to contribute reviews have failed, I guess because nobody would like to just write for free and I can’t afford to pay anyone to review. Hence, your review would have to be only out of passion.

So with that I will be shutting down the website. To avoid losing the posts, I will be importing the posts to this blog.

I will be using to WordPress XML Export to perform the move. I believe I will be able to edit the XML exported to file and split it so that I can import a few posts at a time. I am not sure if I will be able to do so. If not, then all probability you may see a huge number of new posts on this blog.

You should see this happen by this weekend.

If you have been using Google Reader, you would have noticed that it doesn’t work with Opera as of now.

However, there is a fix available for the same which is very easy to apply.

1. Get hold of reader.js and save it to some location on your PC, e.g. C:\Program Files\Opera\profile\cache4\
2. In Opera, visit http://www.google.com/reader/ and then right click in the page your Google Reader page, click Edit site preferences
3. Go to Scripting and see the box for choosing a file there? type the path to reader.js that you got in Step 1. i.e. C:\Program Files\Opera\profile\cache4\reader.js in our example.
4. Refresh the page.

Source: YesWhyYen and Tech-Buzz

So does your sidebar look cluttered with a huge collection of FeedButtons? Well, users do have different choices and we are eager to make it as easy as possible to add our feed to their feed reader.

The result is a highly cluttered sidebar. FeedButton hopes to change all that. You can use them to generate a single button. On Mouseover, the button expands and the user is presented with several buttons for ready subscription.

Found via Tech Buzz