Feed burner is a Google product that allows you to consume and distribute your RSS feeds in a much more in depth way than simply displaying the information in a raw XML format. It allows you to analyse the usage of a feed, add social links into feed articles and push the content onto other web platforms, like Twitter and Facebook.

In this article I will display what I like to call the 'Distributed social circular'. This means that when you create a new Blog article feed burner will automatically consume it, update your RSS feed subscribers, and post a custom formatted Tweet to your Twitter account, hopefully driving more visitors to the original article.

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I've been running an older version of Blog CFC for a while now, so I thought it was well past due an update to the latest version. It seemed like a good time to give the site a lick of paint, so I have de- web 2.0'd it. At some point I got swept up in the curved corners and shiny gradients of Web 2.0ness, and now I just plain don't like it.

If you didn't know already you can get BlogCFC from RIA forge here: http://blogcfc.riaforge.org/. There seem to have been some nice tweaks in the last few versions, and it's nice to see a software application maturing.

In the process of redesigning the site I came across this recent survey of the installed user base for windows fonts. It is always risky for a developer to use a non standard font, so surveys like this are ideal. http://www.codestyle.org/css/font-family/sampler-WindowsResults.shtml

Also I had a little Photoshop help creating the image header. Here is a pretty painless Photoshop tutorial on "Fade Images in Photoshop Using Layer Masks", http://articles.sitepoint.com/article/photoshop-fade-layer-mask

Lastly I've added some Feedburner integration. Feedburner is a great way of consuming your RSS feeds, it adds a whole load of options, and allows you to push feed content out to other community sources, such as Twitter or FaceBook. It also provides stats, a la Google Analytics style, and its free (requires a Google account)! http://feedburner.google.com.

I think I took two things away from this redesign. Firstly, double check your CSS. The only real issues I had during the entire process were CSS related (thanks IE). Secondly index your database properly. I'm not sure if the previous install was indexed at all, or whether the new version just has better indexing in the installation scripts, but the performance difference is notably quicker!

The other day I saw the Word Press Blog Cumulus plugin (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-cumulus/) on a fellow bloggers site, and thought 'I like that, I wonder if it will work inside the Blog CFC framework'. I thought I'd convert it so that it would.

The Cumulus plugin uses the regular Blog category cloud and turns it into a three dimensional rotating globe. It does this using a flash object, and a series of parameters passed in as flashvars.

You need to include the 'swobjects.js' reference call to process to swf, otherwise the 'flashcontent' div will be displayed.

The flashvars include the variable 'tagcloud', this controls which tags are displayed, what their colors are, and where the go (URL). These are generated in a cfsavecontent variable almost as a list.

The swf will control the color of the Tags based on their sizing, or you can specify a 'color' and a 'hicolor', which are the regular color and the highlight color respectively. I have placed the swfobject.js and the tagcloud.swf in my site/includes/ directory, but you can put it where you want, just edit the links.

You can download the code from RIA forge here: Link

Thanks to Roy Tanck for the documentation on how the Cumulus plugin works:

http://www.roytanck.com/2008/05/19/how-to-repurpose-my-tag-cloud-flash-movie/