For the second time in two months, I’ve had a Pom called James ring me and start on a sales spiel, theoretically from Facebook.

The first time was a Friday night at dinner time, when he was coming between me and a pizza with red wine. He wasn’t welcome.

He launched into a script saying how he was from Facebook Australia and was contacting the best Facebook pages in Australia. Given that I only have 1 Like, that was unlikely (pun), but I let him talk. He asked if I’d seen all the advertising at Neutral Bay for Facebook. (No, I hadn’t). He mentioned how great Facebook was for advertising (ha) and made small talk about the health products I mention. Then, still talking at a scripted snails pace, launched into some stats on how many million people were available for health and weight loss advertising through Facebook. (I don’t talk about weight loss). There was so much noise in the background it sounded like he was at a wild party and was taking me for a ride.

That’s when I lost my patience and launched into a mild tirade about not trying to quote search statistics to an SEO, not reading from a script at a snail’s pace, not ringing a mum at dinner time, and how unlikely it was that he was really from Facebook. He blustered about how he couldn’t believe I would say something like that. So I hung up.

End of story, I thought.

Today, same time (although it’s only Thursday) he rang up again – I recognised his voice. He said he was James from Manchester, and how was my Google Maps page doing (for the same health site). And had I seen the advertising in Neutral Bay recently? Obviously they’d given him a new opening paragraph for his script, but that was all. He said he’d even been to a conference for my health products in Manchester just last week – such a coincidence. And when I asked if he was from Facebook, he said, why yes, he was.

Again, I said that sadly it was dinnertime and I really had to study for a (Google) exam. The salesman in him fired up, and he asked what could possibly be as important as the fantastic offer he had from Facebook, and that there was no way he would let me miss out on this life-changing offer.

With the sound of call-centre conversations clamouring in the background, I hung up again.

So Facebook, or Facebook reseller, or whoever you are.
James is a terrible salesman.
And please stop ringing!

I prefer WordPress as a blogging platform, because it’s fantastic for SEO, has so many more functions and plugins than Blogger, despite it being owned by Google. In particular, adding Blogger feeds to other websites is annoying.

This week I was investigating how to add a Blogger feed to an x-cart site. Yes I could have manually written some PHP to extract the feed, but this was for a client who didn’t code.

The standard Feed URL for Blogger is yourname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default.
Or if you’re using Feedburner, something like feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/yourname
Compared to WordPress feeds, which as yourwebsiteurl/feed

Option 1: Blogger is supposed to have a Feed gadget, but it wasn’t available.
Option 2: The Google widget creator at http://gmodules.com/ig/creator?url=yourfeedURL also didn’t work – it kept saying information was unavailable for the client’s blog.
Option 3: Another cheap and nasty option was to simply iFrame the blog feed, as in iframe src=’yourfeedURL’ /iframe, but this was ugly, embedding the entire blog content, although obviously you could style the iFrame size and border.
Option 4: Using Feedburner, there were options such as a rotating animator, but I prefer to see multiple titles at once. However you do need to login to your Feedburner account to generate the code – simply substituting someone else’s blogspot feed into the code for my feed didn’t work.
Option 5: Eventually I found a lovely free feed widget, that didn’t even require email signup, at http://feed.mikle.com/en/. Truly excellent.

Then at night, while I was in the mood for Feeds, I used the Social RSS app at Facebook to embed my WordPress feed to my Facebook page. It was as simple as adding the application, selecting the page and URL, saving the settings and voila – the feed started appearing on my page.

And whilst Googling the above solution, found a Facebook post on adding WordPress feeds to LinkedIn. https://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=199481223424093 explains how to use the builtin LinkedIn WordPress application to grab your feed with one click. Beautiful!