Week 4 #8 - Advertising your feed

If you scroll down to the bottom of your Blogger blog you'll see the following link - Subscribe to:Posts (Atom). If people were to click on the link they could add the address to their newsreader to subscribe.

If you look at the sidebar of my blog you'll notice a nice little orange icon with a link Subscribe in a Reader. What I've done in this blog is to set up my feed with Feedburner. It's totally free and quite easy, especially now that Google has bought Feedburner.

Once you've registered at Feedburner:

1. Type your blog address or feed address in the box where it says Burn a feed right this instant and click on the next button.



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3. Feedburner will confirm the feed. In this example I am adding the library blog's feeds. It actually displays 2 feeds Atom and RSS and asks me to choose. It doesn't matter which format you choose. Click in the circle next to one of them and click on the next button.
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5. You'll now be asked to give a title for your feed and to choose your Feedburner feed address. Then click on the Activate Feed button.
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8. You can set up stats in the next step but let's click on the link to go directly to Feed management.
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Promoting your FeedBurner feed on your Blogger site (thanks to Feedburner for)

1. Click on the Publicize tab.
   


2. Click Chicklet Chooser. The form shown below contains options that link to your FeedBurner feed.
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4. Click the radio button next to the button you want to display on your site. eg Subscribe in a Reader
   


5. Click the drop-down and select "Blogger" to add the chicklet as a Blogger widget and click the Go button.
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7. Blogger will open in a new window. Follow the prompts there to continue to add the new widget
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Go check out your blog and see if it all worked.

Feedburner is fantastic. I can read the stats for the number of subscribers to my blog. I can create email signatures to advertise my blog. If you've ever received an email from me you may have noticed the scrolling signature.

Anyhoo, give it a go.

Cheers, webgurl

Week 2 #3 - Blogging - Why and how would you subscribe?

So you've found quite a few interesting blogs in the past few weeks and you want to keep up with the articles but you don't want to visit each blog every day to read them. What can you do?

Give yourself a pat on the back if you said subscribe!

Each blog has a feed which contains a title and description. Software or applications such as feed aggregators/feed readers can collect and organise these feeds and display updated articles from the bogs (or even some web pages).

Wikipedia explain aggregators/feed readers quite well:

"Aggregators reduce the time and effort needed to regularly check websites for updates, creating a unique information space or "personal newspaper." Once subscribed to a feed, an aggregator is able to check for new content at user-determined intervals and retrieve the update." - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/News_aggregator


Examples of the aggregators or feed readers include Google Reader (to which you already have access if you have a Blogger blog), Bloglines, Rojo. Even Firefox and later versions of Internet Explorer have built-in feed readers.

How do people advertise that their pages have a feed? They use a little orange broadcast symbol such as the one in my sidebar or they might use the terms subscribe and RSS or Atom. If I click on the orange subscribe symbol in my sidebar I'm taken to the Feed. I can select my reader from the list.




For more information on subscribing to blogs, please check out my blog help page on the Eastern Regional Libraries website.

Next up I'll show you how to advertise your feed.

Cheers, webgurl