Further to my original post about RSS feeds, I thought I’d have a quick review of what you need to do to provide a feed from your blog. If you’re lucky, like me, your blog template will have the feeds built-in, with the appropriate links already on the page. If not, don’t worry the format is quite standard.
Some popular blogging formats are listed below, with their typical feed formats: This info from Yahoo
Blogger
Your blog URL is:
http://[USERNAME].blogspot.com
Your RSS URL is
http://[USERNAME].blogspot.com/atom.xml
MSN Spaces
Your blog URL is:
http://spaces.msn.com/members/[USERNAME]
Your RSS URL is
http://spaces.msn.com/members/[USERNAME]/feed.rss
LiveJournal
Your blog follows one of two URL constructions:
http://www.livejournal.com/users/[USERNAME]
http://[USERNAME].livejournal.com
Your RSS URL is one of the following:
http://www.livejournals.com/users/[USERNAME]/rss.xml
http://[USERNAME].livejournal.com/rss.xml
Typepad
Your blog follows one of two URL constructions:
http://[USERNAME].typepad.com
http://[USERNAME].blogs.com
Your RSS URL is one of the following:
http://[USERNAME].typepad.com/[TITLE]/index.rdf
http://[USERNAME].blogs.com/[TITLE]/index.rdf
My Wordpress template had RSS built in, and it was in the format http://blogdomain/?feed=RSS2. But I didn’t leave it like that…
As site feeds come in different flavours (RSS 1&2, Atom etc.) You need to provide your feed in each format, or it can’t be read by everyone. Additionally, people who only visit your site by reading your feed, will NOT be logged by your hit counter software - and that’s quite a few typically. A way around this is to use FeedBurner. Basically, you enter your URL into FeedBurner and they provide you with a single feed address:
(typically feeds.feedburner.com/yourblog). They also provide you with the HTML to embed clickable icons & links into your site linking to your feed. This means that any visitor to the site will find one feed, avaliable in all formats (RSS/Atom etc). Best of all, FeedBurner keeps a log of your current subscriber numbers, so you can see how you’re doing and it’s all free.
Of course, once you’ve set up your feed, you’ll want to publicise it. But I’ll save that for another post.
Entries (RSS)
You are awesome. Thank you SO much for helping me! I have the little orange Icon… so I think it’s all squared away…. I think
-ERika
Oh, and i expect you to subscribe after all that.
Lo Chris,
>Blogger
>
>Your blog URL is:
>http://[USERNAME].blogspot.com
Surely, that’s not necessarily true. I have created three blogs, all with separate names, and I’ve only got one username.
You choose your blog URL when you create a blog. The only restriction seems to be “it hasn’t been taken yet”.
But I know that this is about default stuff, so I’ll shut up now and take off my pedant’s hat.
Owl
Erika,
No probs, & yep you’re on my RSS list.
Owl,
You’re probably right, this was lifted from the Yahoo link so I blame them. Oh, and it’s ‘pedants hat’, no apostrophe… I’ll get my hat now ;-p