Using a Feedburner is a great way to publicize your blog or podcast feed so others can subscribe and you can see how many readers or listeners you have. To do this, you first need to find out what your feed is. In Internet Explorer 7, this is easy.
Go to your blog or podcasting portal and click on the orange icon at the top right of your browser and click RSS. If you have a choice, I suggest you select RSS 2.0.
Copy the address of the feed e.g http://nodehillfrench.typepad.com/two_stars_and_a_wish/rss.xml
Burning a blog feed
Go to Feedburner and register for an account. Paste in your feed into the box and click Next.
Click Activate Feed.
Click Next twice.
Click the Publicize tab and click FeedCount. Click Activate. Choose the body and text colour and click Save
Copy the HTML code and paste it into a template on your blog. For TypePad users:
- Click the TypeLists tab.
- Click Create a new TypeList.
- Click on the dropdown menu under List type and select Notes
- Type in the title e.g. Subscribe.
- Click Create New List button
- Click in the box under Note and paste in the html code.
- Click Save.
- Click Publish.
- Click on the link for your home page e.g. the name of your blog and click Save Changes.
- Click VIEW SITE to see the changes
In Feedburner, click Chicklet Chooser and select Plain Text. Copy the HTML code and go back to your TypePad account.
- Click on the TypeLists tab and your new TypeList Subscribe
- Click Add an Item and paste in the HTML code in the Note box
- Click Save
- Click on the link for your home page e.g. the name of your blog and click Save Changes.
- Click VIEW SITE to see the changes
Burning a podcast feed
Copy your podcast feed using the same process as above e.g. http://nodehillfrench.podomatic.com/rss2.xml.
Sign into Feedburner, paste your feed into the box, tick I am a podcaster! and click Next
Click Activate Feed and click Next
Fill in details about your podcast and click Next twice and. Click the Publicize tab and follow the same procedure as above.
Nice simple to follow guide Joe and good advice too!
Another good reason to burn your feed is that Feedburner also allows you to take your blog's readers with you should you wish to change from one blog provider to another (like I recently did from Blogger to Wordpress: http://www.digitalang.com/2008/05/wordpress-blog-website/).
Next thing we should tell folk about is a way to read RSS feeds from their favourite blogs and websites too, don't you think?
Thanks for another good article,
Seth :-)
Posted by: Seth Dickens | 01/06/2008 at 01:11