I moved over to FeedBurner a while back. DasBlog has great support for FeedBurner – all you do set your FeedBurner feed name in the DasBlog config and it handles the rest, including permanently redirecting your readers to the new feed.
However, I haven’t been able to make FeedFlares work today. FeedFlares “build interactivity into each post” with little links like “Digg this”, “Email this” or “Add to del.icio.us”. Since FeedBurner is serving the XML feed, it’s no big deal for them to add those links into the RSS feed. But to get those same flares to work on the web site, you have to embed a little script at the end of each item. Scott shows how to do this with DasBlog, except that it didn’t work for me. I’ve tried off and on, but for some reason, the FeedBurner script file I was including was always empty.
Then I noticed the other day that my post WorkflowQueueNames had the flare’s on them. Hmm, why would that post work and none of the rest of mine work? Turns out that it works because there’s no spaces in the title. Unlike most of the rest of the DasBlog community, I’m using ‘+’ for spaces in my permalinks, instead of removing them. So I get http://devhawk.net/FeedFlare+Finally+Fixed.aspx as the permalink url instead of http://devhawk.net/FeedFlareFinallyFixed.aspx. In fact, that feature is in DasBlog because I pushed for it (a fact Scott reminded me of while I was troubleshooting this last night). And it was breaking the FeedFlares.
The solution is to URL encode the ‘+’, which is %2B, in the FeedFlare script link. I created a custom macro, since I already had a few custom macro’s powering this site anyway, and now I get the FeedFlares on all my blog entries. I’ll also go update the DasBlog source, but creating a custom macro was both easier and less risky than patching the tree and upgrading everything.