I have discussed RSS feeds in my earlier post and their importance. Virtually all blog templates include RSS/Atom feeds built in, but there are several issues with these:
Tracking your visitors: If 10,000 people a day visited your site, but 9,999 used RSS readers you would think you only have one visitor, according to your site stats software.
Speed of serving the feed: Most of us are on cheap or free hosts. These are not always lightning fast, & consequently you feed could take time to appear or be updated.
Different format readers: As discussed in my previous post, there are many different formats for feeds; if you don’t provide a feed in the flavour your visitor wants, are they going to change readers, or just not come back?
Publicizing: Wouldn’t it be great if you could show your live feed on your other blogs, websites etc. Or even as an email signature?
One answer to all of these points and then some: FeedBurner.
This service is completely free, enables you to deal with the above issues and more. FeedBurner offers the following:
- Track all of your subscriber-numbers, RSS reader used, searchbots (Google etc.) and the number of hits in a given time period.
- FeedBurner checks your site every 30 minutes for new posts & updates the feed. It also serves the feed direct, so there’s no lag. Pingshot means that FeedBurner will ping the major aggregators for you.
- Tick a box, and FeedBurner will convert your feed to any format as it is requested-don’t lose another subscriber!
- Build interactivity into your feeds: Add Digg & bookmarking buttons direct to your feed.
- Advertise your feed. Look at my About page, and you will see a rotating headline showing the latest posts from my Thermal blog. Visit Thermal, and in the sidebar is a live feed of all the posts from Blog-Op. Fanatastic publicity, which can also be added to email signatures.
The list goes on, and all for free. Once you reach a certain level of readers, I would seriously consider taking the paid services as well.
Setup
Easy. Create an account at FeedBurner, submit your URL and they give you your new FeedBurner address. Publicize it using links, posts and the RSS icon, all provided by FeedBurner. Finally, once FeedBurner is optimised & running, there is one more very important thing you must do. Re-direct all your old feeds, built? into your blog template to your new FeedBurner address. It’s really quite simple.
Within your blog template (it was within my WordPress header, it may be your Main Index Template) you need to look for lines of code similar to this:
link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS” xhref=”http://mysite.com/rss.xml”
There will be more than one, and some will have ‘Atom’ instead of ‘RSS’, and may also include the word ‘feed’.
Change the text in the second set of quotations marks to your FeedBurner address. E.g. I changed mine to:
link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS” xhref=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/Blog-op”
Now, all of your subscribers can choose whatever feed they like, but it will all come from FeedBurner, and you will know how many subscibers you have for sure.
It’s quite easy, but if you have any questions, leave a comment & I’m sure I or someone else will be able to help you.