Feedburner feeds - Why? How to?
Blogger blogs have atom.xml as their default feeds. But many people use feedburner feeds for its usage tracking and user-friendly display of the feeds. With feedburner for your blogs you can
1. make sure your RSS/atom feed looks best.
2. find how many people have subscribed to your blog.
3. which are the posts that users are interested to read.
4. create awareness about your feed.
5. implement revenue-generating programs.
6. have paid Premium Services for advanced statistical usage (optional)
All this you can do for free. Over 75,000 publishers are using feedburner feeds for their blogs and websites. You can sign up at feedburner and you will get a unique feed URL for your blog. You might have seen a lot of blogs showing this
and
You may put this and some more buttons too.
Many feedreaders use auto discovery to find your blog feed URL. By default your feed will be http://yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml. To change it to feedburner feed you have to follow these simple steps.
Go to your blogger dashboard, click on your blog name. Select the template tab. In the source code you will see the following code (between <head>…..</head> part)
<title><$BlogPageTitle$></title>
<$BlogMetaData$>
<style type=”text/css”>
Now delete <$BlogMetaData$> and paste this code instead
<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=UTF-8″ />
<meta name=”MSSmartTagsPreventParsing” content=”true” />
<meta name=”generator” content=”Blogger” />
<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/atom+xml” title=”TITLE OF YOUR BLOG” href=”YOUR FEEDBURNER FEED” />
<link rel=”service.post” type=”application/atom+xml” title=”TITLE OF YOUR BLOG” href=”http://www.blogger.com/atom/XXXXXXX” />
<link rel=”EditURI” type=”application/rsd+xml” title=”RSD” href=”http://www.blogger.com/rsd.g?blogID=XXXXXXX” />
<style type=”text/css”>
@import url(”http://www.blogger.com/css/blog_controls.css”);
@import url(”http://www.blogger.com/dyn-css/authorization.css?blogID=XXXXXXX“);
</style>
Note that you should change the following in the above codingTITLE OF YOUR BLOG = type your blog title similar to what it looks like in the title bar of your browser.
YOUR FEEDBURNER FEED = this is the URL that feedburner gives for your blog. It will be similar to http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeed.
XXXXXXX = this is your blogID. While you are in the template tab of your blogger dashboard you can see the blogID displayed on the Address bar of your browser. ex: 1234567
Now click “Save Template Changes” and then click republish. That is all. Now the feed readers will discover your feedburner feed instead of the atom feed. This coding will work for all blogger blogs.
Note: Whenever you click “republish” or “republish entire blog” it is better to click “republish index only” at least once if your prefer to display only a short description of your posts. Though, it is a resolved issue now.
You may also visit the feedburner forum for more help.
Dont forget to ping your blog after each and every new post.
Update: If you enable autodiscovery of Feedburner feed in your blog, then the “links to this post” feature in blogger won’t show the links. To solve this problem, Imporbulus has a solution and it works pretty well. What you need to do is copy and paste the following code just before the ending </head> tag in your blogger template.
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.blogger.com/js/backlink.js”></script>
<script type=”text/javascript” src=”http://www.blogger.com/js/backlink_control.js”></script>
<script type=”text/javascript”>var BL_backlinkURL = “http://www.blogger.com/dyn-js/backlink_count.js”;var BL_blogId = “XXXXXXX”;</script>
You need to replace the “XXXXXXX” with your blogId.
The links to individual posts will start appearing immediately after you republish.
