hey feedburner, don't make me work so hard
| Commentsi've been looking at options on feedburner and saw something called a 'photo splicer' that you can add to your feed. basically your provide them your user name of a photo service and they'll add that feed into your current feedburner feed -- a feed merge if you will.
cool, i thought i'd try it out (i immediately took it down because for me it just didn't make sense). the first thing i noticed was something akin to seth godin's new site www.thisisbroken.com. here was one of the configuration options:
note the text box label: "Flickr ID or Screen Name" -- it says "or Screen Name" right? i'm not just seeing things? okay, so i try the screen name...why? because that is what every flickr user immediately knows, duh. error. "XXXXXX" is not a valid flickr id. yeah, i knew that...your label said "or" so i'm trying the "or." okay, clearly it wasn't working. now, i was smart enough to read the fine print that is there, but heck it still said "or" on the label. now take a moment and read the fine print. okay, quick, what's your flickr id? exactly.
feedburner is basically saying: "okay, go here, do this, look at the url, and get this random string of characters" -- yeah, unintuitive. by the way feedburner...my flickr photostream doesn't have that :-) -- guess what it has? my screen name. argh. and by the way, the flickr api's allow you to take a screen name and interpret the id...so feedburner...don't make me work so hard!
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