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Just Installed MadKast – Blog Sharing Made Simple

I’ve been heads down coding for what seems like 8 years now when in reality it’s just a few months, so I’ve been a little out of touch with what else is going on in the Boulder start-up scene. This also explains my spotty blog posting, but hopefully I’ll get a chance to post a bit more frequently soon. Josh from MadKast recently contacted me about installing their product, so I decided to give it a whirl. (On a side note, I have no affiliation with them at all, I just like to support fellow start-up companies.)

What is MadKast? I guess I would describe it as the FeedBurner of social bookmarking & discovery– it gives your blog readers a way to share your posts, and also supposedly gives you a way to see other sites that your readers are viewing, analytics behind what your readers are sharing with other people, etc. I haven’t yet received any sort of confirmation e-mail about a way to login and view this information, but maybe that happens automagically once they have some data to work with. Until then I don’t have a good idea about the latter parts, but the concept seems cool at least.

Just thinking about how functionality similar to this usually works, I fully expected to have to go download a WordPress plug-in, unzip it and SCP to my server, then enable it in WordPress and have to edit my post templates, etc. I never really looked into it because I just assumed I’d have to go through all of that work and I honestly just don’t have the time or interest currently for that. I’m just spending an hour today to try and get caught-up on personal e-mail and decided to give it a whirl. When I saw that I just needed to include a link to their script, I was still a bit skeptical thinking I would still need to edit my post template to get it to work. Not so– it literally took just a few seconds to get up and running on my blog, so color me impressed.

I’m interested to see what sort of information I can gleam from the analytics portion of MadKast, and hopefully I can start blogging somewhat more frequently soon to make that sort of thing more valuable to me. I do feel like my site is starting to get a bit widget heavy, but it still seems to load quickly for now.

Have you tried MadKast? What do you think about it? Have you seen the analytics portion of it?

Posted in Culture, Languages, PHP, Site News, Tech News, Tips, Hacks, & Tricks, Tools. Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , .

4 Responses

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  1. Brandon,

    Thanks so much for installing madKast! I hope that you and your readers will enjoy using it to share your content. Please let me know if you have any feedback — positive or negative — on the entire madKast experience.

  2. @Josh

    Only good things to say so far– it’s very easy to get up and running. I’ll let you know if I have any other feedback.

Continuing the Discussion

  1. IntegrateIT linked to this post on October 4, 2007

    madKast…

    I read Brad’s post about madKast a while ago and pinned it in Bloglines to get back to and never did. I got an email from Josh at madKast this morning and that reminded me to get off my a$$ and take the 30 seconds to install the madKast widget. I…

  2. madKast | bitbucket.kylewelsh.com linked to this post on November 5, 2007

    [...] Posted in November 5th, 2007 by Kyle in Technology I read Brad’s post about madKast a while ago and pinned it in Bloglines to get back to and never did. I got an email from Josh atthis morning and that reminded me to get off my a$$ and take the 30 seconds to install the madKast widget. I looked around and saw that Brandon Harper installed madKast last week. Installation was a- here is the pertinent content from Josh’s email that describes the madKast widget: "Our madKast widget will allow your readers to share your blog posts with friendsthrough e-mail or MMS text message (full blog post) or any of the existing social bookmarking websites (such as Digg) at the click of a button. Notably, installing our widget will also help reduce any sharing ( i.e., e-mail, Digg, etc.) clutter — which Brad Feld once referred to as "site acne" — that you may have attached with each post. Check it out on Brad’s site; we’re the green share icon next to the title of each post. [...]

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