Today I’m talking about “Coolness, Google App Engine, Feedburner, and GeoTagging”.Feedburner will be a short extension of what we discussed last week about making feeds. I’ve been exploring it more and wanted to share what I found. If you have a feed already through a blog or somewhere else, you’ll definitely want to hang around.

So let’s get started.

First, I made a fascinating discovery today. It will help you be cooler than you already are. I tapped into some social phenomenon.

So what happened? I had multiple people come up to me and say they liked my shirt. That has never happened before. All my t-shirts have stuff on them, but this is the first time I’ve had multiple comments.

What’s the shirt? It is just a big grey t-shirt with the Dunder Mufflin logo on in. If you watch the TV show “The Office” often, you may know that Dunder Mifflin is the fictitious paper company that the characters work at. Today I got proof that tons of people are watching that show. The logo is like an inside joke. It’s not even the name of the show. There are apparently lots of insiders.

http://www.nbc.com/The_Office/

Everywhere I went today people saw the shirt and smiled. That’s a nice feeling, and for the first time it wasn’t because I looked funny. Nice change of pace. A good feeling – making people smile.

In a period of an hour visiting the grocery store and the mall, four people – count em – four people went out of their way to get my attention and say they liked my shirt. It was absolutely surreal. That never happens to me. I am not a magnet for that sort of attention. Normally I blend in quite well. Today I stood out.

Anyway, so if you have a local Kohl’s, go and buy this shirt. You’ll be cool. It will brighten people’s day. People love it. Ok that’s my “how to be cool” tip. Don’t expect many more of those – I don’t have much material.

Next thing. Well, I spent all of last week talking about RSS feeds, as you may have heard. I was giving all kinds of advice. What the tags are, how to debug them..

You may spend your days squashing software bugs. I do. They creep up everywhere. And they’re never expected. Well, sometimes they’re expected, but hopefully they’re always a surprise. The more distractions you have the more bugs you may have. This could be one of my person top issues. Distraction.

Anyway, I was made aware of a bug in my feed that was only affecting a Linux podcast feed aggregator – well hopefully just that one. I want to thank the individual who brought this to my attention. His name is Peter Stradinger. Just so happens he is no stranger, but a long time friend of mine. He took time out to help me with my bug, so I just wanted to say “thanks”..

I’ll give him a plug too, although indirectly – he’s still working on his website so I won’t mention that – but I will mention something dear to his work life. This would be Python and Django. I think it bothers him a little that I talk about PHP so much. He’s moved on from PHP to the world of Python and Django and is trying to get me to follow.

Someday soon I hope to check those out. Especially now with Google’s new AppEngine – you may have heard of it – it is free web app hosting that requires Python programming. There is a Django version already working on it, along with Google’s Django helper app that’s in the early stages.

AppEngine isn’t totally ready yet, but developers can start programming now by downloading the SDK and developing on their local machine. I did. It worked great on my Mac. Just go to code.google.com/appengine/ and learn all about it. According to their blog at googleappengine.blogspot.com they are working on supporting more than just Python.

I think AppEngine is going to be huge. You don’t worry about the database or scalability. All that is built in. Awesome. Can’t wait to learn enough Python – like my friend Peter would have me do – so I can make some web apps on Google’s platform. Good times.

I was told somewhere that Amazon also has a service like this. I think you have to pay for that, unlike Google’s. Not sure. Go see for yourself. amazon.com/aws or developer.amazonwebservices.com. Just quickly I see they have PHP, Java, Ruby and C# support. Interesting.

The topic I had intended to cover primarily is an extension of our feed discussion from last week. I’ve been digging around more with feedburner. Turns out it does a lot of the things that I was saying a person could do if they were to load a feed and splice in other data to it, such as advertising.

If we take a look at the feedburner site we see five tabs representing the five general things you can do with your feed. They are: analyze, optimize, publicize, monetize and troubleshootize. I like that last one. Everything had to end with “ize”.

Monetize allows you to put Google AdSense ads or Feedburner Ad Network ads into the feed. Interesting. Guess I wasn’t the first one with this idea. As usual. In fact I probably saw it somewhere and didn’t realize it was part of the feedburner service. Worth checking out if you have a massive feed and ads can be worthwhile without looking out of place or abusive to your audience. I hate lots of advertising but I also realize I’m getting a lot of great services for free so maybe it’s worth it.

The Optimize tab, the second tab, was what caught my eye this week. First off, there is an “XML source” option that lets you see the xml code of your feed after feedburner has had it’s way with it. This is great. I had been going to feedvalidator.org to see the code. But now after the application is deployed, I can just check it out in feedburner. Cool. One stop shopping.

In addition to that little feature, there are 15 services on this page. The service called “SmartFeed” proved useful. It attempts to make your feed more compatible with all the aggregators out there. Never a bad idea. When I first started making feeds I thought it was easy until I explored how they come out in different readers. Very important to target more than one reader. You never know what people may be using. Google Reader is a big one but certainly not the only one. If I can parse XML, I know there is already a million others doing it.

Another service is called “FeedFlare”. It inserts links at the bottom of your stories that allow people to do things such as add the story to delicious or facebook or digg. Good for letting your subscribers spread your words around.

OK just a couple more and I’ll let you explore on your own. One is “Photo Splicer” that can merge your flickr feed into your current feed. That’s a good example of automating the merging feeds together liked we talked about last week.

Another service is “Geotag”. It let’s people know where the feed is coming from.

ProBlogger Blog Tips feeds had a good post on how to geotag a web site. What feedburner does for a feed you can also do to a website.

http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/04/15/geoblogging-how-to-geotag-your-blog/
http://www.2dolphins.com/

Here are the tags for a web page. You can use the latitude and longitude feedburner gives you to fill in the blanks in these meta tags.

GeoURL

<meta name="ICBM" content=" XXX.XXXXX, XXX.XXXXX ">
<meta name="DC.title" content=" THE NAME OF YOUR SITE ">

GeoTag

<meta name="geo.position" CONTENT="latitude; longitude">
<meta name=”geo.country” content=”US” />
<meta name="geo.placename" CONTENT="Place Name">
<meta name="geo.region" CONTENT="Country Subdivision Code">

They said once you’ve geotagged the blog you can submit it to GeoURL, GeoTags and feedmap. Geo-Serendipity is a Google Maps-mashup by Fabio Cipriani that shows you a map marked with the nearby sites.

Add a URL with these.

http://www.feedmap.org/blogmap/submit.aspx
http://geotags.com/geobot/VWadd-request6.html
http://geourl.org/add.html
http://geo.serendipidade.com/index_en.php?tipo=URL&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.2Dolphins.com&raio=10

Search by street address with this.

http://www.feedmap.org/BlogMap/search.aspx

While some of these features are cool, some of them left me wondering. Title burner, for instance, made me wonder why anyone would ever not have titles in their feed. Seems odd. Equally odd is description burner. In my mind, if your stories don’t have titles or descriptions, your feed isn’t ready for prime time. The basic components are titles and descriptions. It’s all the other stuff that one might consider extra. But that’s probably me not being aware of some uncontrollable feed out there that just has to use feedburner to correct it’s inadequacies. Maybe I’ll be lucky enough to discover that problem in my travels through tech-dom.