Giving Google Juice
Yesterday I added furl to the services I use and I will be doing so a lot starting now. I just need to get used to not pressing bookmark, but furl, and not sending eMails to work with links I want to look at there but to furl it. It’s a great service, check it out.
The nice thing is that you can also add your latest entries from Furl to your own website, at the time via JavaScript. I am already including my People feeds from Bloglines, another great service by the way, via JavaScript. There is one bad thing with this JavaScript integration though. Bots can’t follow the link because they simply ignore JavaScript. So I wondered if I cannot simply include them in PHP and started looking for a URL that I could include that didn’t return JavaScript code with it. Nothing to be found, on either of the services. So yesterday evening I mailed both Furl and Bloglines with the question of providing none JavaScript feeds.
Furler numero 1 Mike answered first in that they do provide an RSS Feed or if I needed something else, and I had to admit that I was playing it a bit lazy there, as I could have integrated that. I replied that I can do that, but that I was just being lazy (you have to honest :)) and simply wanted to include plain HTML. A few hours later, back comes a link that works perfectly! Now I include my 10 latest furls in PHP just fine.
Then I wake up and I have a mail from Bloglines founder Mark Fletcher say nothing more than thanking me f or the suggestion and that they will have a HTML version soon. “ _;-)_ ”. Just 30 minutes later I get an eMail that they just rolled it out. If you go to the help page on sharing your Bloglines subscriptions you get walked through to a page that will then give you a JavaScript version and it now says:
_If you use PHP or another method to include raw HTML into your blog, use the following URL instead, which returns the blogroll as HTML.
http://rpc.bloglines.com/blogroll?html=1&id=biz&folder=People&target=_blank_
Now how cool is that?That line might even be put there for me, as it fits to my question, but emm… I doubt that. :) Both services responded by implementing it and they did it amazingly fast. Thank you Bloglines and thank your Furl for the great service!