I've recently switched over to Outlook '07, and if you ask me it rocks. But the romance wore off quickly when I discovered I couldn't use Feedburner's Headline Animator as an Outlook signature. I searched all over and yet everyone says it can't be done... everyone but Dustin that is. Yes, Dustin knew the answer and showed it to me... so I'm showing you.
Assuming you already have the feedburner code for your headline animator (if not go to the publicize tab of your feedburner feed and choose Headline Animator- come back here when you get your code), let's get started.
The first thing we need to do is set some options in Windows Explorer so you can get to the files you need. So right click on the Start Button and choose Explore. Now go to the Tools drop down menu and choose Folder Options
Select Show hidden files and folders.
Also clear the checkbox labeled Hide Extensions for known file types.
Click OK and minimize Windows Explorer.
Now we're ready to do some real work.
Open Outlook '07 and go into the Signature window.
Click New and name it feedburner.
Now depending what you're plan for your signature is, what you do next is up to you. If all you want is Headline Animator then you're done here- just click ok, but for me I wanted to add some text to go along with the Headline Animator. Since Feedburner uses Verdana as a font I selected that and size 8 for my text.
Now save and close.
If you just want the headline animator and nothing else in your signature the open the Windows Explorer window again and navigate to this folder:
C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Microsoft\Signatures
Where the username in red is your username.
Now you should see a file called feedburner.htm, right click on it and select "open with" and choose notepad. You'll find there is an incredible about of stuff in here. Highlight it all and hit delete. Now cut and paste your feedburner code into notepad and save.
Since I wanted to add some text to it, I opened my favorite html editor and navigated to the path above and opened the feedburner.htm file. I went to the bottom of the file and right below the </DIV> tag I pasted my feedburner code and saved the file.
Outlook will do a rather flaky thing now, if you have more than one Signature, set this one as your default, and change to the other, also make certain that you close Outlook and comeback in or else you'll find that it will squash your feedburner animator, like the one on the left.
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