Feed Sidebar 2.0 has been released. Upgrade now to enable filtering your feeds with the search bar and to experience the big improvements in performance and memory usage.

Filter your feeds with the search bar.

You can install it at Mozilla Add-ons.

If anyone who has been using Feed Sidebar is interested in testing out the next version, you can install this nightly build of Feed Sidebar 2.0pre. Besides massive improvements in performance and compatibility for various feed types, it sports a nifty new search bar that you can use to filter your feeds:

(Clicking the magnifying glass hides the search bar.)

Please send any bug reports to cfinke@gmail.com or leave them as comments on this post.

Alright, so which Gawker Media developer reads my blog? Just yesterday, I posted a request that Gawker not include "categories" before the post titles in the RSS feeds, and I just noticed that they've been moved to the end of the title and enclosed in brackets - that's good enough for me.

Thanks Gawker!

The Gawker Media blogs (Consumerist, Gizmodo, etc.) do something with their RSS feeds that is incredibly annoying: they include a "category" of sorts before the title of the post:

This does two things:

1. It obscures the actual title of the post. Many feed readers are loaded in the sidebar, which has a limited width. You should be making the best use of this space.

2. It makes it harder to scan the items to find something of interest. I can't scan the first few words of each title, since each title actually begins at a different point for each item, depending on the length of the category name. I've found that I rarely read items from the Gizmodo feed just because it's difficult to parse the titles for interesting news, but I read Engadget much more frequently for the opposite reason.

As far as I am concerned, these prologues add no value. Gawker: please either use the <category> tag in RSS for this information or provide a feed that doesn't have it at all.

I've updated the Feed Statistics plugin for Wordpress to version 1.2; this update adds a "Top Feeds" page where you can see what the most popular feeds for your website are (e.g., main feed, category feeds, different feed formats). It shows a list of all of the feed URLs that your subscibers are requesting, and how many people are requesting each feed.

(Note: if you're already running the plugin, this page will take some time to fully populate.)

This release also includes a fix proposed in the comments section by Nathan Pralle to better detect all of the different ways that feeds are accessed. Thanks Nathan!

To install this plugin:

• If you installed an earlier version, download the zip file of the latest version here, and overwrite feed-statistics.php in your blog's wp-content/plugins/ directory.
• If you're downloading it for the first time, just copy it to that directory and activate it from the Plugin administration menu.

Want an easy way to generate a podcast or RSS feed? At Eliot's request, I wrote a PHP script that generates an RSS feed based on the contents of its parent directory, so whenever you add files to that directory (or its subdirectories), the feed is updated with links to those files. It also supports enclosures, so if you add an audio or video file to the directory, that file will be available to podcast clients. If you modify a file in the directory, the feed updates the link so that subscribers will see that it has changed. It's a no-fuss way to syndicate content without having to tie it into a CMS like Wordpress or TypePad.

Here's how to use it:

1. Save this file as EasyFeed.php (or dir.php or feed.php, it doesn't really matter).
2. Copy it to a directory on your webserver.
3. Subscribe to the feed with any RSS or podcasting client.

That's all there is to it. For example, here's the feed of all of the files I've ever uploaded for use in my blog. If you subscribe to that feed with iTunes, you'll see that I've uploaded two audio files: programming.mp3 and calacanis.mp3. iTunes will automatically download them, as well as any other audio/video files I upload. No fuss, no muss.

Digg finally fixed the bug I reported and wrote about here 3 months ago. When you consider that my feed reader checks for new items every 15 minutes, 10 hours per day, I received an unreadable feed almost 4,000 times.

At about 12:50 PM CST today, the main RSS feed for Om Malik's GigaOm blog started displaying only links to articles at Panzera Security Blog. Did someone hack into Om's Feedburner account, or was this an accident?

Update: I've contacted Om about it, but I don't know how much attention he pays to the messages sent via his contact form.

Update: It's fixed now. No announcement on what happened, but several GigaOM commenters came to the same conclusion as I did.

Update: Barry Abrahamson from Automattic clarifies in the comments that it was a Wordpress.com feed caching bug that was giving FeedBurner the wrong feed.

What is the Feed Sidebar? It is an extension for the Firefox Web browser that displays all of the unread items from your news feeds (also known as Live Bookmarks) in the sidebar for easy management.

One of the most frequent feature requests I get for the Feed Sidebar Firefox extension is the ability to set a maximum age on the items that appear in it. (e.g., "I don't want to see any articles that are older than 3 days.")

I've added this functionality in the form of an age-limit button; click on the button and select one of the options to change the allowable time period for feed items.

The latest version of the Feed Sidebar can be installed from the Feed Sidebar homepage.

I've just uploaded a big update to the Feed Statistics plugin for Wordpress. This new version allows you to track which posts your subscribers are reading and which links they're clicking on. It also has better feed reader statistics, and a more organized administration menu.

See the updated homepage for a full writeup of the new features.

To install this plugin, download the zip file of the latest version here, and overwrite feed-statistics.php in your blog's wp-content/plugins/ directory if you downloaded an earlier version. If you're downloading it for the first time, just copy it to that directory and activate it from the Plugin administration menu.