Feed You (RSS for Your Blog)

As promised, here are some quick tips for inserting an RSS feed button on your blog. Don't have a blog? Try this Guide to Blogs to read all about them or create one yourself.

Getting the Basic Feed

Create an account with FeedBurner. FeedBurner makes it super-easy to create an RSS for your blog because it prompts you to enter your blog URL on the homepage, and then steps you through finishing the "burn" of your blog. When you're finished, you should end up with an RSS page (for reference, this is mine).

If you are happy with this page, you can simply insert a link to it on your blog (say, in your blogroll or another link list).

You should also insert this link into the "feed URL" box under your "settings" tab on blogger (under the "feed setting" subheader).

Even if you already have a feed, you can still "burn" it. "Burning" will enable you to change formatting of how your feed is displayed, write a message for the readers that reach your feed page, as well as easily create fun widgets, chicklets, and other neat promotional stuff for your blog.

Getting the Code for Special Widgets, Buttons, and Other Feed Extras

If you are looking for something more flashy, say a chicklet (really just a button), you have a few options:

1. Go to the "Publicize" tab in your FeedBurner account and select "chicklet chooser" from the menu of the left.

This will give you a code to put on your blog.

2. Now, for those of you that would like to take your feed one step further (or who would like to limit the number of web sites you need to check for your blog stats), you can integrate your feed into your AddThis account.

Sign into that AddThis account that you no doubt created the other day when I showed you how to create a bookmarking button at the end of each post.

When you sign in you'll see "Get the code for my widget" near the top of the page, choose this. You'll be directed to the same page you visited when you created your bookmarking button, except this time you are going to choose "feed widget"

Enter in the RSS URL address that you got from FeedBurner (or, if you already have a feed, enter that URL), this would be the URL for a page such as this one (that I already showed you earlier).

AddThis will then generate a code for you to put into your blog.

Putting the Code in Your Blog

In blogger, you can insert this code as a "page element" (under your "settings" tab in blogger, choose "page elements" and click "add page element") - the element you want to add is "HTML/JavaScript." Copy the code given to you by FeedBurner or AddThis, give it a title (such as RSS feed) and it will show up on the right side of the blog (just like mine does).

Comparisons of AddThis verus FeedBurner

FeedBurner allows you to track how your feed is being used and if anyone is subscribing. Also, the plain old FeedBurner RSS page actually shows snippets of your blog along with the buttons with which users can subscribe. The AddThis page only shows buttons for users to choose how to subscribe to the RSS of your blog. So, although right now I have the AddThis button on my page, I might someday change to a FeedBurner chicklet instead, because I like users to have a sample of my actual RSS available so they know what they are signing up for.

AddThis allows you to track the subscriptions to your blog, this tracking is not as detailed as the tracking from FeedBurner, but the benefit is that you can check these stats at the same time as your Bookmarking stats, so you get the benefit of two sets of data on one account.

Also, from what I can tell so far, because my AddThis button uses my FeedBurner URL, both sites track data for me - so I can check both to see how my blog is doing.