Featured Feeds - dannychoo.com

For those who don't know, Featured Feeds is a program where we place each others feed on our sites to share traffic which is what the Internet is all about. My users get to discover more great content (your blog/site) and your readers get to discover my sites. Win x Win all round.

dannychoo.com is regularly featured in broadcasted and printed media such as CNN, BBC and G4TV. You can see a full list of media coverage in my profile.

I also regularly collaborate with makers and companies like Bandai (Bandai World Gunpla Competition), Good Smile Company (Tokyo Figure Show), Kotobukiya (Otacool), Google (Favorite Places) and there will be more in the future.
These collaborations alone bring in a load incremental users who will discover your content. My collaborators are obviously reading the site and will discover your content too.

If you blog about figures, anime, Japan and related topics then Featured Feeds is the program for you to not only help increase exposure but also readership of your blog. Its also a great program for folks who have just started a blog and would like a boost in readership.

On dannychoo.com, posts from your RSS feed will appear in the footer of all pages across the site.
Feeds appear randomly and you can click the "refresh" link to see other partners. As feeds are displayed randomly, it could be a while of clicking before you see your bits n pieces ^^;

Posts from your RSS feed will also appear thumbnailed on Otaku.fm. You can read about the news aggregator in this previous post.

You can click "Grid" to get the grid view and get an instant overview of what treats are available from all Featured Feed partners.

If you click on a username, you will see a list of posts that have been aggregated so far. This is a screenshot of feeds belonging to Ultimaknight.

This is a screenshot of the blog belonging to member Ultimaknight. Have a lookie at his blog. You will see the RSS feed of dannychoo.com showing up in his right column. He has the dannychoo.com feed on his top page and post detail pages.

Being a Featured Feed Partner is simple. All you have to do is follow Ultimaknight's example and place the dannychoo.com RSS feed on your top page and all detail pages.

There are plugins for you to easily do this for folks using Wordpress, Blogger or other blogging platforms.
Remember - to have your posts displayed on Otaku.fm and all over the site in the footer, you need to have the dannychoo.com RSS feed registered on your site and be showing at least 5 items.

"Featured Feeds figure.fm" is a different program. If you want to have your feeds show up on the top page of figure.fm, you need to have the figure.fm RSS feed registered on your site just like Ultimaknight has done.
More details at figure.fm but remember that it is a completely different program to "Featured Feeds - danychoo.com"

As soon as the dannychoo.com feed is showing up on your site, proceed to edit your dannychoo.com profile and click on the "Featured Feed" tab.

You will see "RSS Feed URL" and "Your Website URL" which both should be self explanatory.

It is your responsibility to make sure that your feed is valid. Also, the Website URL should be the location of your site or blog like http://lightningsabre.blogspot.com/ for example.

On the right you can see "Feed Category" - choose what you feel fits your blog content. If you cover everything under the rising sun then just categorize as "Otaku." You can change your category at a later date but your feed needs to be re-approved.

Once you are done, hit "Apply."

Once you hit Apply, the button will change to "Cancel Application" and you will see "Pending Approval" under "Featured Feed Status."

What happens now is that the Mirai Gaia Bot will then visit your site and check to see if the RSS feed of dannychoo.com is showing up.

Many moons ago I used to do this manually but now have Mirai Gaia do all this automatically.

Once the Mirai Gaia Bot has confirmed that you have the dannychoo.com feed on your site, the Mirai Gaia Spider will then proceed to spider your feed which will then start to show up on Otaku.fm and in the footer of dannychoo.com.
This is *not* instantaneous and may take up to 24 hours - but usually within 30 mins.
You will see "Application Approved" under your "Featured Feed Status." If you see any other message like "Application Rejected" or "You Smell" then its most likely that Mirai Gaia Bot could not discover the feed on your top page and blog detail pages.
You can place the dannychoo.com feed on your pages and re-apply.

You will also see a link under "Application Approved" to a list of posts that Mirai Gaia Spider went to fetch. The spider usually runs once an hour and fetches the latest couple of posts from your feed.

A few things to note:-

• Mirai Gaia Spider looks for the first <img src="/moo/someimage.jpg"> in your post and makes a thumbnail from that. At this moment in time, only jpegs are supported. If your image tags are malformed then the spider will not be able to fetch images.
  
• Images over 1MB will be ignored.
  
• If there is only a YouTube video to be found in your post, the spider will attempt to make a thumbnail from the video.
  
• Posts without any images or videos don't show up by spec - sorry!
  
• If your application has been approved but your posts are not showing up then check the validity of your feed at W3C Feed Validator.
  
• Check to see if your server or blog settings don't have leeching settings turned on or we wont be able to grab your image to make a thumbnail.
  
• Check your profile settings to see if your feed has been approved. Remember that it is your responsibility to ensure that you have a valid feed registered.
  
• You will not receive any notification at this moment in time regarding your feed status - you need to check back under your profile settings.
  
• Mirai Gaia Bot will regularly visit partner Featured Feed sites. If it cant find the dannychoo.com feed anywhere, it will deactivate your feed and it will not be spidered anymore. In this case, your posts on dannychoo.com and otaku.fm will disappear. Need all partners to play fair which is why the Mirai Gaia Bot was programed to be Tsundere.
  
• However, we understand that there are technical issues from time to time and Mirai Gaia Bot will check a site a few times before deciding to deactivate a Featured Feed partner in the event that the dannychoo.com feed cannot be found.
  
• Please display at least 5 items from the dannychoo.com feed.
  
• Mirai Gaia Bot does its rounds when it feels like it and usually goes out during low traffic periods.
  
• Hmmmm. I thinking that the Suenaga World needs a new mascot robot or pet called "Mirai Gaia Bot" ^^;
  
• If you need some banner material then you can nab some from the Suenaga World page.
  
• Finally, If you are trying to grow readership of your site, do be careful with other "Featured Feed" programs which have you placing their feeds on your site which constantly contain many adult type words which will reduce your Google Page Rank and affect your search engine rankings. Read this post for more details. The idea of a feed share program is to increase readership of your blog - not reduce it by having your search engine rankings reduced.

The dannychoo.com RSS feed is here - look forward to working with you!