Setting up a RSS Feed
As promised, I'm going to show you how to equip your blog with your very own RSS feed. My experience is with FeedBurner. There are others, but like I said, I have experience with FeedBurner.
First things first. If you haven't registered yet, jump right in. After you register, you will be asked to "Burn a feed right this instant." Translated, it means put the URL of your blog in the box, and click next.
Since a website URL was typed in, FeedBurner looks for your feed. Sometimes you have two. In this case I selected the RSS option, then click next.
The next page gives you a chance to change the title of your feed, and shows you your feed address. If you are happy, click activate.
The next screen is the congrats stuff. I just click on Skip directly to feed management. That takes you to a screen with several tabs across the top of the page. Click on the Optimize tab. You will see a row of options in the left sidebar. Click SmartFeed and activate that service. This makes your feed compatible with all readers.
Before you go any further, look around. Click all the tabs and run down the left sidebar. There are many ways to customize your feed. When you are happy with what you have you are ready to Publicize your feed.
Select the Publicize tab and click Chicklet Chooser in the sidebar. This is where you choose the icon you want displayed and any additional readers you want displayed. (Remember, you don't have to show all the readers, the feed will automatically translate your feed into a format that can be used by your visitors' feed reader application.)
Scroll down the the bottom of the page and select Blogger. Copy this code. It is what you will paste in your sidebar widget.
To put it in your blog, open Dashboard | Template | Page Elements | Add a Page Element | HTML/JavaScript. Paste that code in the window. Save and you have a shiny new feed for your blog!!
Oh, by the way, if you want to use your own RSS feed icon, that is easily done. Do you see the png file in the above image? Upload your image to your webhost (I use RipWay) and then replace http://www.feedburner.com/fb/images/pub/feed=icon32x32.png with your own image location.
12 Comments:
Help me understand the advantage of using Feedburner vs. just useing the feed that Blogger produces?
@w2wkb, Besides being compulsive, I'm a control freak :-) and I'm an admitted geek. I like having the options that FeedBurner offers. Here are just a few:
1. popular feed items (that tells you what is being read)
2. tells you about your visitors, like what reader, browser, OS they use
3. it tells you for any particular day, the number of visits, number of page views, and the top 10 pages on your site that day
4. gives you an idea of how many of your visitors come from refering sites (and which site that is) and how many come from searches. It even tells you what the search words were the visitors used.
4. It offers email subscriptions.
5. You can add an animated banner to your site or as an email sig.
Honestly there are just too many reasons to list. I love getting into the workings of my template, and this is just another way to get into the workings and have more control over what it does.
OH, one last thing...the PRO features are free now!!!
Hi Annie,
Some times I get 4 or 5 options for feed source how does one know which is the best to select and what is the difference.
@janey wan (I was wondering who this is...Hi Janet!! I love the janey wan story.)
I think you may be getting an option for posts and comments. I only got posts because ages ago I deleted some comment code. (Now I wish I had it back.) And since I got 2 options, that makes sense. I went with the RSS option. Just a gut feeling. I think that is more standard than the Atom feeds. Like I said...a gut feeling.
I'm still learning so much about this, so I don't have a definite answer to give you. Could you tell me what the options were?
Annie,
It is usually different each time I add a feed. I will make note the next time I find the different options and let you know.
Thanks for the useful info Annie. :)
Ha! I'm in the loop now, baby. Thanks for the tutorial, annie. Great stuff. Now to go "redesign" my feed section. Muhaha-ha.
@dcloud, I just signed up! I hope I was the first one!!
Hi, Annie! I tried setting up a feed for my blog but I got this error message when I tried to "burn a feed":
"The URL does not appear to reference a valid XML file. We encountered the following problem: Error on line 7: The reference to entity "zx" must end with the ';' delimiter."
I tried looking for that particular line in my template but couldn't find it. I hope you can help me. Thanks!
@candyq, did you copy the entire code to paste in your template? My suggestion would be to start over from the beginning. That is what I do when I get stuck. Start from scratch.
Looks like Feedburner offers some analytics. Cool. Thanks for sharing.
The URL does not appear to reference a valid XML file. We encountered the following problem: Error on line 11: The reference to entity "zx" must end with the ';' delimiter.