Reid Dossinger

How many people you think they got working on that Feedburner thing over there? One? Half? A summer intern? A guy who works on it while he watches football? The flaws and problems with Feedburner have been frustrating to say the least, so I was pretty damn excited when, a little over a month ago, Feedburner finally announced that they were integrating the ability to add in Google Analytics campaign data to the end of feed item URLs. This was huge. Before this, you had to add in the string into the original RSS feed, which most of us couldn't do since we didn't have access to that original feed, but wanted to track when people were coming from our feeds. My excitement ended, though, when I cranked up the feature and saw what it did to my stats. Yes, it was helpful to see who came from Google Reader or Bloglines, but if the content was syndicated, it stripped out the referrer. This was a problem with my music blog . Hype Machine is by far and away our #1 referrer, and when I imp...

When I'm home at my parent's place in North Carolina, I become tech support for the various problems my parents (mostly my dad) have had since the last time I visited. I like the role (especially when I can fix the problem), and it lets me learn things that I wouldn't encounter otherwise. This Christmas, my dad brought me a problem I'd never had before: the smart playlists on his iPhone wouldn't sort the songs in the way they were sorted in iTunes on his Windows machines. No matter the order it showed in iTunes, the iPhone only ever showed them in an order decided by some criteria I could never figure out. After some Googling and reading through long, long threads on the Apple forums, I finally got the workaround to fix it. It's kind of a ridiculous fix, in that Apple needs to fix it permanently, but it works. It's simple: Open up the properties of the playlist (File > Get Info OR right-click > Edit smart playlist) Add a new condition to the playlist: ...

Let's talk about RSS and Readers for a second, huh? I'll say up front that any discussion about this requires forgetting the normal melodrama that accompanies articles claiming that "RSS READERS ARE DEAD!", which is almost always based on the narrow fact that the author has stopped using one. RSS Readers are nothing but notification services for new content. Period. So I'm not sure why there's so many people treating them as though they're a specific social media service. Those notifications can take any number of forms, from actual readers to automatic Twitter updates to other notifications, so why pick on "RSS Readers"? Everything that reader-haters suggest as alternatives are really just different kinds of RSS readers. Ultimately, I'm amazed how many people-- tech people --completely forget that RSS is only a way to get content into different places and not just a way to feed it into readers. Now, I know that these blog posts tend to be wr...