That photo, entitled “Kid Tested, Kid Approved” appeared on my Facebook page when I next logged in and, being the die-hard fan that I am, I immediately copied and pasted it into the BrisbanePhotography.com community forum.

Whereever the photo was shared and copied the photo drew discussion about where and how the plush toy could be bought.  It was usually in the form of an excited exclamation-point-emphasised sentence that clearly conveyed just how excited that particular fan was about the prospect of purchasing yet another novelty item to add to the bookcase.

About a week later, as a subscriber of the free What the Duck newsletter, I received an email telling me, and the other email subscribers, exactly how we could order our WTD plush toys online before anyone else could.  Did I feel spesh’?  You betcha!

What were the two very clever things that Aaron did?

First, he created buzz by releasing a simple teaser photo but no “how to buy” info.  Would he have generated as much enthusiastic chatter around the various social networking sites if we could simply click through to make our purchase and then immediately return to making efficient use of company time?  Not a chance!

Second, he rewarded his biggest fans for subscribing and staying subscribed to his mailing list.

Clever, huh?

Get your What the Duck fix

The What the Duck comic strip follows the day-to-day encounters of a cartoon duck who happens to be a professional photographer.  The insightful and dry dialogue between our hero and his various colleagues and clients is hilarious – and anyone who has ever freelanced in the creative industries will surely relate.

Check it out at www.whattheduck.net

Here’s a sample for those not already familiar with this hilarious photography-oriented comic strip.

First, we need a function that will fetch the What The Duck RSS feed and parse it into an array from which we can extract what data we want.  This function, below, is called getWhatTheDuck() .

Second, we need another function that will take that array of data and format it.  We can display just the latest comic strip or any number up to the total featured in the RSS feed.

For the purposes of this sharing of knowledge, the code will loop through the array and output everything that’s available.  It should be a simple matter to change the loop to go through only once if you only want to display the latest strip.

See the PHP code

See the PHP script in action

Download the PHP script