wayne on September 12, 2008
Your site feed settings administration page in Blogger provides you the ability to manage your subscriber feed. It's core to the operation of your blog and allows visitors to receive what you post on your blog in their email inbox, or within a reader such as Google Reader. Providing an easy way to find your feed link and helping your visitors find that link to subscribe to your feed will help to increase the chance they will become regular visitors to your blog. That's what we all want as bloggers isn't it?
Note to new visitors! If you would like to know more about this series or view all available lessons, just follow the appropriate link.
If you would like to first know more about what we are talking about when speaking about feeds, subscribing, RSS etc, please view my RSS Subscription page, at the bottom is a great video explaining all those terms and more. As always, if there are still questions, you can ask me directly by commenting, or asking me via my contact page.
Read this warning if anything!
When you change the source location of your feed, your existing subscribers will be affected. You will need to write a post that explains to your readers what you are doing, and help them to change their feed reader settings to point to the new feed address...if you happen to switch to another service such as FeedBurner.
Where is the 'feed'?
Normally, the Blogger feed link is located at the very bottom of each page, and usually says something like "Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)". The reason I say 'normally' is because with templates, you can change where this link appears, so not everyone may have it in the same location, nor have the same text.
Clicking the "Posts (Atom)" link will take you to your actual feed page. The URL that you find yourself on is the same URL you would use with other services that ask for your sites feed address. For example, the feed address for the Views On Life blog is http://www.viewsonlife.net/feeds/posts/default. Please note, if you are not using a custom domain, you would see something like http://viewsonlife.blogspot.com/feed/posts/default. This particular URL does not work anymore because I have switched to a custom domain on the Views On Life sample blog.
How many feeds do I have?
There are actually 3 different types of feeds available to your visitors. Here is a quick description of each one.
- Blog Post Feed - This provides your visitors with the content of your posts. It contains the title and body of the post, as well as some of the extended information such as author and the date and/or time the post was posted.
- Blog Comment Feed - A less used feed probably, the blog comment feed provides visitors with an RSS feed of the sites comments. The feed looks like this and as you can see the feed contains the comments, and that's about it.
- Per Post Comment Feed - Just like the blog comment feed, the per post comment feed provides the same functionality, however it is only for the comments on a single post.
Managing your Blogger.com Site Feed
The controls found on the management page allow you to control certain aspects of your blog feed. Let's take a look at each one.
Allow Blog Feeds
Providing a blog feed to your users is standard fare for blogging. You might also want to provide the feed for services as well. For instance, some web sites allow you to include your feed on their site, thus allowing your posts to reach even more people. Blogger provides good control over your feed with the following settings:
- None - If you don't want to offer any way for your visitors to subscribe to your feed, this is your ticket. Your site feed will no longer exist, and any services that you might have wired up to the feed address will subsequently fail.
- Short - Your feed will be available, however the content provided by the feed will not be the entire post, but rather the first 255 characters of the first paragraph, whichever is shorter.
- Full - This setting will provide the complete post text to your subscribers.
If you happen to click the Advanced Mode link found at the top of the Site Feed settings page, the Allow Blog Feeds control is replaced with 3 controls. Each of these controls manage the three different feed types individually.
Post Feed Redirect URL
The post feed redirect URL is used to change where your feed is served from. Remember, you start off with Blogger providing your feed. What if you wanted to use FeedBurner instead? This is where you would tell Blogger that you no longer want your feed to be served from Blogger, but over here instead at this other URL.
Here's what happens when you enter a URL in this field. When one of your blog pages is displayed to a visitor, blogger will change the link that serves your feed to use the address that you entered here instead.
Like I said in my warning above, if you are starting a brand new blog, you have the perfect opportunity to work out where you want your feed to come from without impacting your readers. If you're blog is already operational, then you will need to dance around a bit and make people change their reader settings to continue to get your feed. It's a pain in the butt, but you might find the FeedBurner services and reporting tools a better option than what Blogger offers.
Post Feed Footer
The post feed footer text will display in the footer of your feed. Anything you put here will display in the footer of your feed content, but not the content of your blog itself. This only works if you give your users your entire content with your feed by choosing 'Full'.
You might want to display an advertisement, let's say. A nice 468x72 pixel banner ad would probably look best there.
Blogger.com Help Topics
Blogger Feed URL's
How do I change my site feed settings?
Can I get a sites feed for specific labels?
Content is missing from my site feed
Interesting Links
List of unique RSS Feeds
RSS Calendar
Subscribe to My Feed!
This is as good a place as any for a nice plug for my own feed. Subscribe to my blog today and start participating in the conversation here at WayneJohn.com. I guarantee you'll learn something new...eventually. :)
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