I was messing with the RSS feed generator, and it turns out that feedburner.com/colourfulthreads is someone else’s blog. I typed that in and let it run, rather than using the one I generated feedburner.com/jenniferscolourfulthreads.

So the RSS feed got blasted with a big bunch of someone else’s blog posts.

Oops.

A “cookie” is a little bit of text that a website can store in your browser. For example, an ad company can store a bit of text saying where you saw an ad and when. When you see another web page with an ad by the same company, they can read the cookie they left and say “Hmm, this person likes news websites.”

Regularly clearing your cookies is always a useful practice.

However, there’s a new kid in town.

FLASH COOKIES are exactly the same, except they are not stored by your browser, they are part of Flash (a program that helps you see movies and other animated content on the web). The DO NOT GET CLEARED when you clear cookies in your browser. They are NEVER cleared. Some companies use Flash cookies to rebuild a normal cookie, even if you clear them. This can be bad.

This website is the control panel for clearing your flash cookies. Look at the huge list of flash cookies that are likely already on your PC, even if you are paranoid about cookies and cache and all of that stuff. Scary, innit? You can clear them using that web page.

Now, let’s be fair. Cookies can be useful. Staying logged in so that whenever you open your browser, GMail is there and you don’t have to enter your name and password? That’s a good use of cookies. Cookies can be used for good things.

I just like having control over what’s stored about me, and I like knowing that it’s there.

Hey everyone, vote for us to win a $15,000 kitchen update from Ikea.

You can vote here!

Forget Swine Flu. Forget Ebola. Forget Encephalitis!

Your Flip-Flops will kill you!!!

And did you notice, I changed my mind in the title. Eh? Relevant to the subject of the post, eh? Get it? Get it? Sometimes I amaze myself.

If you run WordPress MultiUser (WPMU), like I do here on Wonderfulpages.com, then you’ve no doubt found the plugin trap.

Many plugins you used to use on WordPress don’t work, and to get the most obvious plugins for WPMU you need to pay wpmudev lots of money or essentially handcode them yourself. The hostage plugins include a Sitewide RSS feed, Most Recent Posts, Most Recent Comments and a few others. They’re obviously critical to a good WPMU install (who wants a main site front page without those?) , but you have to pay $79 US to get the real versions and the free versions are crappy, out of production or not much better than handcoding yourself.

I wanted a sitewide RSS feed for posts and comments so that I could use the RSS feed to populate a Most Recent Posts and Most Recent Comments area on our front page. I would end up killing three birds with one stone. I’d have my fron page data, and I’d also have a unified sitewide RSS feed for users.

Sitewide RSS Plugins: IT Damager’s plugin has disappeared from the internet. The ADA SiteWide Feed plugin had some serious bugs that prevented me from doing anything (see the comments on that page). The WPMU Dev version is $79.

So, how could I do this for free? The answer lies with feedburner and Yahoo Pipes.

You can use Yahoo Pipes to merge many RSS feeds into one. For our purposes, just add each of your sites individual post feeds (http://mysite.com/feed) or comment feeds (http://mysite.com/comments/feed) into the “Fetch Feed” module in Yahoo Pipes and sort by PubDate, descending.

Take the output of the Pipe, and create a feedburner feed for it, so you can track it and gain all the benefits of feedburner.

Upsides:

• Free
• Simple
• Uses big name providers, not likely to die soon
• Get sitewide stats and individual stats (if you create feedburner feeds for your individual sites too)

Downsides:

• You need a Yahoo and a Google account
• You need to add sites on your WPMU install manually to the feed

Next post on listing the RSS feeds on your main page coming soon.