Teach42

One of the more confusing aspects of blogging is RSS, but that’s truly the heart and soul of a blog. Without the RSS feed, you just have a web page. Your RSS feed allows people to subscribe to your content via aggregator or email, or allows you to take your content and republish it in a variety of ways. For example, it’s what allows you to announce your blog posts on Facebook or on FriendFeed and so on. Your feed is an absolutely critical piece of your blog and you always want to make sure it’s functioning, happy and standards compliant.

While just about every blog engine out there supports RSS, most are fairly basic feeds. They do the job, but not much more than that. Of course, that begs the question, what else would you like your RSS feed to do? Wel, for one thing you might want to engage in podcasting. Most people don’t know it, but it’s your RSS feed that takes a link to an MP3 file and turns it into an actual podcast. It realizes that you’ve linked to an MP3 file and then adds in some special code that let’s podcatchers like iTunes know how to get access to the audio file. Interestingly, it doesn’t just do it for audio files. PDF’s, Video files, and documents of all sorts caqn be sent out via a podcast. That is, if your RSS feed handles the data right. And that’s barely the tip of the iceberg.

While most RSS feeds are just adequate, Feedburner is a free service that can take an adequate feed and make it superior. I’ve been using Feedburner to remix my feed for about 4 years now and can’t recommend it more highly. There’s a few reasons that I suggest using Feedburner to upgrade your feed, but the biggest is a very simple practical one. Bloggers move around sometimes. You may start on Blogger, then move to EduBlogs.org and then wind up hosting your own someday. Who knows? Maybe you’ll start off on your own and then move to a school server. You never know what the future is going to bring. Typically, every time you move your blog you’d need to alert all of your readers that your RSS feed is changing. They need to unsubscribe from your old feed, and then subscribe to your new feed. While some people will do so, more than likely you’ll lose readers that way. If you have people subscribing to a Feedburner feed instead, you just change were Feedburner gets it’s information from and your readers are unaffected.

Let me step back just a little bit and ensure you understand what I mean on this one. Typically your blog engine (Blogger, EduBlogs, WordPress, Blogmeister) creates your RSS feed. When you sign up for Feedburner, you supply them the link to your RSS feed and then they give you a shiny new Feedburner feed. Then you hide all instances of the original feed and make sure that everybody is subscribing to your Feedburner feed. The feedburner feed passes along the EXACT same information, but it mixes it and mashes it up to make it more standards compliant, enables all sorts of additional features, allows you to keep a closer eye on your subscriber data and more. So it’s just a shiny new version of your original feed, but with a new address.

I’m not going to take you step by step how you sign up for feedburner, because they already have some great walk thru’s for it, depending on your blog engine. This page has quick start guides for Blogger, WordPress, Typepad and MySpace. Sue Waters has a phenomenal write up of how to add Feedburner to your EduBlogs blog. And for the record, most of her steps will work just fine on other WordPress blogs.

Once you’ve signed up for Feedburner and have your shiny new Feedburner link, there’s two things that you need to do in order to make sure that people find that instead of your old feed. The first is add a Feedburner chicklet to your sidebar. Log into your Feedburner account and go to the Publicize tab. One of your choices is the Chicklet Chooser. Follow the steps there to create a chicklet that appeals to you. Grab the code and paste it somewhere in your sidebar so that people can find it. Then glance through your sidebar to make sure that you don’t see any other references to your old RSS feed. At this point, I would also suggest that you alert your current subscribers to switch over to your new and improved feed. If they don’t, no worries for now. They’ll still receive content via your old feed. It isn’t turned off or anything. But you do want to encourage them to move over to the new one.

The second thing you need to do is fix your auto-discovery options. If you use Firefox , Flock, Opera, IE7 or Safari , you may notice certain notifications when you’re visiting web pages that have RSS feeds. When that icon appears, that means that there’s subscribable content on that page. Clicking on the RSS icon takes you to a page that gives you a variety of ways to subscribe. However, we want to make sure that it’s providing ways to subscribe to the NEW Feedburner feed. If you use an official redirection service like a WordPress Plugin (same goes for Edublogs) or Blogger’s Feedburner redirection service, then no worries, it should handle it for you. In Typepad, you can connect your Typepad blog to Feedburner and then it’ll handle it for you. If you use anything else, you may need to edit your template yourself to do this part. While it may seem intimidating to do so, it’s not that complicated. Just a matter of tweaking a few lines of code. This blog post will show you how.

So today’s challenge is to upgrade your RSS feed to Feedburner today. It’s one of those things that may seem like a pain the first time you do it, but trust me when I say that you will never regret it. It’s well worth the effort in the long haul. If you’ve already upgraded your blog to Feedburner, then use this as an excuse to browse through the site and see what options have popped up since the last time you visited. Most people set up Feedburner and then promptly forget all about it. Did you know that you can mix in events from your Google Calendar? Or add icons allowing people to forward on your articles, promote them on Digg, or GeoTag them for you? Is your Creative Commons license in your feed on and up to date (not everyone actually VISITS your blog)? Are you allowing readers to subscribe via email? Feedburner is adding features all the time, take a few minutes to flip through the features you may not have seen recently.

If you have any problems with this challenge, let us know via comments below. I’ll do my best to try to point you in the right direction. Also, don’t forget to add yourself to the 30D2BBB Wiki, so people know who you are and where your blog is. That way we can all try to support each other!

30d2bbb image by Jason Robertshaw is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License