In January 2008, I wrote a technical tutorial about how to add FeedBurner's FeedFlare social sharing buttons to a b2evolution blog that was running multiple blogs from a single installation. This was one of those nitty-gritty hacks that early bloggers needed because the tools we had just did not do what we wanted out of the box.

What FeedFlare Was

FeedFlare was a FeedBurner feature that added social sharing and bookmarking links to the bottom of your blog posts. Think of it as the ancestor of modern social sharing buttons. Subscribers and visitors could email your post, share it on Digg or del.icio.us, or bookmark it for later. These were the social platforms of 2008, and FeedFlare was the easiest way to integrate them with your blog's RSS feed.

The Technical Challenge

The problem was that b2evolution did not have a FeedFlare plugin, and I was running multiple blogs from one b2evolution installation, each with its own FeedBurner feed. The FeedFlare JavaScript code was specific to each feed, so I needed a custom solution that would dynamically switch the FeedFlare code based on which blog the reader was viewing.

The solution involved hacking the b2evolution skin files directly. I added PHP code to the single post template that used a switch statement to check the blog ID and load the corresponding FeedFlare JavaScript. It was not elegant, but it worked. Each blog got its own FeedFlare buttons, and readers could share content from any of my blogs.

Why This Is Completely Obsolete

Every single technology mentioned in this tutorial is either dead or irrelevant in 2026:

• b2evolution has an insignificant market share, having lost to WordPress years ago
• FeedBurner was acquired by Google and has been effectively abandoned
• FeedFlare no longer exists as a product
• Digg in its original form is long gone
• del.icio.us (Delicious) shut down and was resurrected multiple times but is a shadow of its former self
• RSS readers are used by a tiny niche audience compared to social media feeds

The Lesson That Endures

While the specific technologies are ancient history, the underlying principle remains relevant: making it easy for readers to share your content is essential for growth. In 2026, that means having clean social sharing buttons, Open Graph meta tags for rich previews, and content that is formatted for easy sharing on platforms like X, LinkedIn, and various messaging apps.

The tools change. The need to make content shareable does not. And the willingness to hack together a custom solution when the off-the-shelf tools fall short is still one of the most valuable skills a part-time entrepreneur can have.