Sphere Related Content Available Through Feedburner FeedFlare

Since launching our Sphere Related Content widget, we’ve had a ton of requests from bloggers who would like to try it out. Last week, we introduced a WordPress.org Plug-in and it seems to be very popular with the WordPress crowd.

In order to make the Sphere Related Content widget available to the maximum number of bloggers, we’ve been working on a very simple solution that makes it available as a FeedBurner FeedFlare. Last night, we finished it and have been testing it out on a few blogs today. Seems to work just fine so we want to open it up to anybody with a MoveableType, Blogger, TypePad blog or anywhere else FeedFlare works.

We’d love to get your feedback on it. It shouldn’t take you more than a minute or two to add to your existing FeedFlares:

1) Log into your FeedBurner account

2) Select your feed, go to the Optimize tab and select FeedFlare on the left

3) In the “Add New Flare” box, enter this URL and click “Add New Flare”:

http://www.sphere.com/partner/feedburner/sphereit_feedflare.xml

4) This will add a flare called “Sphere Related Content” to your Personal Flares. Enable this flare for your site ONLY by selecting the 2nd check-box, it doesn’t work in feed readers, only in a site

5) Save your settings. If you already have FeedFlares in your blog, you’re all set. If this is your first FeedFlare, click on the dropdown to get the code for your platform, the instructions for each platform are very easy to follow.

That’s it, the new flare should start showing up next to your other ones within a few minutes. It takes FeedBurner a few minutes to process the new flare and to request content from Sphere for your links.

6) In Movable Type, if you have modified your templates, you can, as an optional step, add <!–sphereit start–> … <!–sphereit end–> markers around the body text of your posts in your permanlink pages. This will help us with the text extraction from your blog and can improve the quality of the results, but it’s not required.

In Movable Type (advanced templates), the body text tag is <$MTEntryBody$>, so these tags would go around that as follows:

<!–sphereit start–>
<$MTEntryBody$>
<!–sphereit end–>

Please let us know if you have any problems getting this flare running — we’re very excited about this one, it’s a very simple way for bloggers and authors on many different platforms to finally get Sphere’d 🙂