Sean Deasy

Techcrunch is reporting that Feedburner is to be bought out by Google. I use Feedburner on this blog to track usage and stats on my rss feed. It is a very popular service amongst bloggers so I’m not surprised that Google has decided to purchase them. It will be interesting to see how the service changes over the next months, will it be rebranded, will the service offering expand ? We’ll have to wait and see.

$100 Million Payday For Feedburner – This Deal Is Confirmed

Feedburner is in the closing stages of being acquired by Google for around $100 million. The deal is all cash and mostly upfront, according to our source, although the founders will be locked in for a couple of years.

For a few weeks now my rss feed on this blog was not working and it took me a while to track down the problem. When I ran the feed through the feed validator it reported that the feed was being returned as text/html as opposed to text/xml.

After alot of testing and trying to track the issue down, it eventually turned out to be due to a wordpress plugin that I installed a while back to do syntax highlighting called WP-dp.SyntaxHighlighter. It did the trick with the syntax highlighting for code snippets but it totally messed up my rss feed. In order to fix the feed I deactivated the plugin and began the search for a similar plugin which wouldn’t mess up the rss feed. I have just installed the WP-Syntax plugin as a replacement code syntax highlighter plugin and it works a treat without breaking my rss feed.

Since this blog is of a technical nature I plan to be posting more code snippets as time goes on. I obviously want the source code to appear pretty on my blog with all the syntax highlighting that one is used to in modern IDEs (including Visual Studio .NET 2003/2005). I run this blog using WordPress and I have just installed a plugin to take care of the Syntax highlighting called WP-dp.SyntaxHighlighter. It supports many languages and I’ll be interested mainly in the .NET languages. Below is an example of a code snippet in C#

using System; 

public class ReverseArraySort
{
   public static void Main()
   {
      string[] strings = {"beta", "alpha", "gamma"};
      Console.WriteLine ("Array elements: ");
      DisplayArray  (strings);
      Array.Sort    (strings); // Sort elements
      DisplayArray  (strings);
   }

   public static void DisplayArray (Array array)
   {
      foreach (object o in array)
      {
         Console.Write ("{0} ", o);
      }
      Console.WriteLine();
   }
}