Tutorial: How to setup RSS feeds for your blog
I have recently conducted a Blogging Basics workshop for the NYC Webgrrls and a lot of people asked me how they would go about setting up an RSS feed for their blog. Below is a step by step tutorial for setting up your RSS feeds for Wordpress, Blogger, and Typepad blogging platforms.
If you are not familiar with what RSS feeds are and why you should use them, take a look at RSS 101 article published by FeedBurner.
In this tutorial, I’m going to show you how to integrate your feeds with FeedBurner, which will enhance your feed functionality by offering you the following features and more:
- Detailed statistics about your subscribers and subscriber count
- Allows you to set up email subscriptions for free so your users can receive your blog feeds via email
- Allows you to add social bookmarking functionality
Step 1. Set up FeedBurner Account
- Go to FeedBurner’s website and click the Register link at the top of the page.
- Fill out the registration form and click Sign In once you are done.
- When you sign in, you will be taken to the myFeeds page
- Enter the URL of your original RSS feed in the textbox and click Next. The URL will look something like this
- http://yourblog/?feed=rss2 or
- http://www.yourblog/feed/
You should type the address in a browser to test it first (see image below for an example)
- Next, enter your Feed Title and Feedburner Address (see image below for an example)
- Once, you activate the feed, you will get the following screen:
Make sure to Write down your new FeedBurner URL.
Step 2 - Activate FeedBurner’s SmartFeed
There are two feed formats…RSS and Atom. Unfortunately not all feed readers support both formats and in order to ensure compatibility with ALL RSS readers, FeedBurner offers the SmartFeed feature, that will automatically keep track of the feed format that each of your subscriber’s feed readers support and display the feed in the correct format.
To activate FeedBurner’s SmartFeed feature do the following:
- In the manage feed section click on the optimize tab. From the services menu on the left, click SmartFeed.
- Click the Activate button. You should see a confirmation.
- Test your Feedburner feed address (http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourFeedName) in a browser window to make sure that it is working.
Step 3 - Integrate your FeedBurner feed into YOUR Blog Platform
FeedBurner integration varies depending on which platform you use to publish your blog. Below are links to articles published by Feedburner on how to integrate your Feedburner feed with some of the most popular blog platforms: Blogger, Typepad, Wordpress Self Hosted, Wordpress.com, and MySpace.
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Blogger |
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TypePad |
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Self-Hosted WordPress |
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WordPress.com |
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MySpace |
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Improve wordpress blog performance with Super Cache
Is your Wordpress blog getting too big and slow? Then you must download and install the Super Cache plug-in which is said to improve Wordpress performance by at least two times over WP-Cache.
What is an Application Cache?
An application caching mechanism is a way to store data that requires a lot of processor time or other server resources in memory. This is done by programmers to improve performance of the application. Because the server does not have to recreate the information every time users request it the application, in this case Wordpress, responds faster and delivers the content to the user faster
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Must Have Plug-Ins for Wordpress Blogs
Plug-ins to Increase Page Views of Your Blog
Related Posts plug-in increases page views and influences your reader to stay longer on your blog. The users are already reading something on your site that is of interest to them, you can influence them to stay longer by offering content on similar topics.
Top Postings plug-in showcases to newcomers your blog’s most popular blog posts to hopefully get the reader interested in your classic posts and prevent them from leaving your site.
A Site Map of your blog provides a “Table of Contents” of all of your blog posts so users can scan all of your posts easily. If they can find something interesting to read quickly, they will probably stay on your site longer.
Plug-ins to help Build a Community on Your Blog
To build a community, you have to let users comment without registering and because Spam is the biggest concern when it comes to not moderating comments, you should install the following Anti-Spam plug-ins: Akismet, Math, and Captcha.
Subscribe to comments plug-in allows a commenter to get e-mail notifications when new comments are posted. This encourages commenters to come back and stay engaged in the dialog.
To encourage people to comment, you can install Top Commenters plug-in. You can showcase and highlight the people who most frequently comment on your blog, creating a sense of community.
Plug-ins to Increase Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) of Your Blog
All in one SEO pack plug-in modifies your blog title so it becomes more search engine friendly and allow you to add meta keywords to your posts, another technique to get indexed on search engines.
Google Sitemaps plug-in creates a google compliant site map of your blog which will help google search engines index your blog better.
HitTail suggests the “most promising” keywords “hidden in the Long Tail of your natural search results”. When you start using their suggested keywords, you will boost the natural search results of your site.
Plug-ins to Help you with Editing Content on Your Blog
Polite-ifier plug-in removes bad language from your commenter’s posts.
ST Visualize plug-in adds more advanced functionality to your blog’s visual editor in the admin area.
Plug-in to Print Blog Posts
The Print plug-in allows your readers to print your blog post
Plug-ins to Backup Your Blog
Backup your blog database with the Wordpress Database Backup plug-in.
Plug-ins to View Reports of Your Blog
Wordpress Reports plug-in displays charts of your Feedburner stats and Google Analytics stats from inside your WordPress admin panel.
More Wordpress Plug-Ins for Your Blog
WordPress has a centralized plugin directory.
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