Adding an RSS feed icon to your blog, using Feedburner

Adding an RSS feed icon to your blog, using Feedburner

Article Feedburner RSS

Feedburner's chicklets are used to add the standard "orange radar" button to your blog.  This lets readers to subscribe the RSS feed of your choice.   The information is targeted to Blogger users, but most of it applies to anyone who uses Feedburner.

What is a Chicklet, and why you need one:

Previously I've explained how to remove the (ugly and confusing) "Subscribe to Posts (atom)" link from your blog, and why RSS / Subscribe to Posts is important to your blog and how to create a Feedburner feed for it.

But an RSS feed is useless unless people subscribe to it.  So as well as making the feed, you also need to put something in your blog that lets your readers sign up for it.

A standard option for this is the orange square with "radar" markings on it, which many people call a "chicklet" (since it lets your viewer - the chicken? - have access to the feed you are providing).

Feedburner also has options for:

• Using a custom icon from popular web aggregators
  I'm not sure that this is a great idea, because you don't know what feed-reader software your readers actually use, and the whole point of a feed is that you don't dictate how people see your blog.

• Using an icon that promotes Feedburner.  This cute, but I've never seen anyone use it.

How to add a chicklet to your blog:

Log in to Feedburner, using the Google account that owns the feed.

Click on the name of the feed you want to provide a subscription tool for.

Choose the Publicize tab.

Choose the Chicklet Chooser option, from the left navigation bar.

Choose one of the options shown:  the default one is the standard-size RSS-radar-button.

Scroll to the bottom of the screen and either

• Copy the HTML that is shown, and add it to your blog in the same way that you would add any other 3rd party HTML,
  
  OR  (note:  there have been some reports that the option below doesn't work any longer, as Blogger has changed but tools like Feedburner have not help up)

• Choose Blogger from the drop down list beside "use as a widget in", and click Go. 
  
  This takes you to a Blogger screen where you can choose which blog you want to add the gadget to (if your current login has more than one), and what title to use for it. 
  
  When this is done, click Add Widget. 
  
  This takes you to the Design > Layout tab, where you can drag-and-drop the widget to wherever you want it.  
  (When I tried it just now, instead of the layout screen I got a "bad request" message.  However pressing Save and then View Blog brought up the blog with the gadget showing, and I was able to go back and edit the layout later on).

What your readers see:

Your readers will see an item, wherever you put it, that looks like this:

Subscribe in a reader

or



or

or something similar, depending on what option you chose from the Chicklet Chooser screen.

When someone clicks on one of these items, they are taken to either a screen where they choose which feed-reader software to add your site to (if you've used the first option), or to the specific feed-reader software.

Customising the widget code:

If you use the generic RSS button, then you may want to customise the widget code slightly:  It looks ugly not to have a space between the picture and the word "Subscribe" - and it's good to have the phrase "RSS" on the screen because that'ss what RSS-savvy people search for when they're looking at a website and want to find the subscribe option.  I also prefer if the subscribe action opens in a new tab/window, rather than taking the reader away from my blog.

This is quite easy to do, if you put a few line breaks in so you can see that

• the code is actually two separate link statements
• the first one has an image (the orange "radar bars" that it takes from Feedburner)
• the second is a text link
• both of them link to the RSS feed address

So it's quite easy to add a couple of extra spaces (shown as   ), change the text as I've done below, and add   target="_blank"   to both of the links

<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/Blogger-hints-and-tips" rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" target="_blank">
<img src="http://www.feedburner.com/fb/images/pub/feed-icon32x32.png" alt="" style="vertical-align:middle;border:0"/>
</a>

&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp;

<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/Blogger-hints-and-tips" rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" target="_blank">

Subscribe via RSS

</a>

I generally also put the option to subscribe to my blog by email and the Feedburner FeedCount item (which shows the number of subscribers) in the same area, to give people options, and to encourage them to subscribe.

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Related Articles:

Using Feedburner to give your blog a Subscribe by Email option

Adding 3rd party HTML to your blog

Why RSS / Subscribe to Posts is important to your blog

How to create a Feedburner feed for your blog

Ditulis jackcode Pada 01.01.00 Komentar

The "follow by email" gadget: an easy way to add an email subscription to your blog

The "follow by email" gadget: an easy way to add an email subscription to your blog

Article Email Feedburner Following RSS

Blogger have made it very simple to offer an email-subscription to your blog, with the "Follow by Email" gadget.  This article describes adding it to your blog, and how it works for your readers.

Previously, I've explained why RSS is important for your blog, and how to give your blog a subscribe by email option using Feedburner.

The Follow by Email gadget that Blogger provide makes this even easier:  you can add an email subscription option to your blog by following these steps:

How to add the Follow by Email Gadget

1. Log in to Blogger
   Use a Google account with admin rights to the blog, and which you want to use to get statistics about your email subscribers.
2. Go to the Design tab
3. Select Add a Gadget in the area where you want to put the email subscription option
4. Choose Follow by Email (it's current at the top of the list)
5. Enter the title that you want displayed on your blog (initially it's "Follow by email")
6. Press Save.

This puts the gadget onto your blog.  But there are two more things that you should do:

• Check that your blog's RSS feed is enabled: it should be either "Full" or "Until Jump Break", not "None".  You need to do this because the Follow-by-email tool will only send out emails if your feed is turned on.   

• Subscribe to it yourself- by entering your own email. 
  This isn't absolutely essential - the tool works even if you're not signed up to it.   But it's a good idea to try to see your blog from the reader's perspective.  
  And some items in your posts (eg slideshows or PowerPoint presentations) may not work as expected in the emailed version - and you won't know about it unless you're getting the emails.

What your readers see:

On Your Blog:

 

The Follow by Email gadget looks like this:

The title was set when you were adding the gadget:  you can change it by editing the gadget in the usual way.

The background colour, button colour, title underline and font are based on the settings for your template:  you can only control them by editing the gadget colours in your template.

You cannot put text immediately before our after the place where people can enter an email address:   though you could put a text-gadget before or after the Follow-by-email gadget.

When they enter an email address:

When your visitor enters an email address and presses Submit, a new window opens:

This window:

• Welcomes them to Feedburner
• Acknowledges their Google account, if they are logged in at the time - remember, not all your visitors will be Google users
• Tells them about the feed that they are asking to subscribe to
• Warns them that a confirmation message will be sent to the email address they entered 
  "will receive a verification message once you submit this form" and that "FeedBurner activates your subscription to ... once you respond to this verification message"
• Asks them to solve a text-catpcha puzzle, to prove it's a real person (not a computer) setting up the subscription.

The colours, design and content of this window are totally controlled by Feedburner.  You can't influence them in any way.

After the anti-spam-test is successfully completed, a second screen opens.   This tells the reader that

Your request has been accepted! Please check your inbox for a verification message from “FeedBurner Email Subscriptions”, the service that delivers email subscriptions for <<your-blog-name>>. You will need to click a link listed in this message to activate your subscription. If you dont see a confirmation e-mail in a reasonable amount of time please check your bulk/spam folder.

Again, you have no control over the color, format or placement of this window, it is totally up to Feedburner.    You also don't control the message text, which many people are likely to ignore.

In their email in-box, today:

Your potential subscriber gets an email from Feedburner, usually within 2-10 minutes, asking them to click a link to complete the subscription process.

• If they click the link, they become a verified subscriber.

• If they don't click the link, then they stay on the subscribers list as unverified.

You can customize the "click the link to subscribe" message, using some fairly simply settings in Feedburner.  

In their email in-box, when you post:

On days when you have posted to your blog, every verified subscriber is sent one email message, with all your posts during the day.

The message may include the full post or just a summary, depending on what settings you have for your blog's RSS feed  (Settings > Site Feed > Blog Posts feed).

Feedburner provides a number of options for controling how this email looks, and when it is sent:  see the Publicize > Email Subscriptions > Email branding tab in Feedburner for these.    (full article coming soon).

More information about the gadget:

This new gadget has been widely requested, and is an exciting addition to Blogger.  But there are some challenges with it, which are discussed in Understanding the Follow-by-Email gadget.

You can get a list of the people who have signed up to receive your blog-posts by email - be aware that this is all people who have subscribed, not just ones who used the widget.

What happens if you delete the widget

Even if the follow-by-email gadget is deleted from your blog (by accident or deliberately), the Feedburner subscription that it created, and the list of people who have subscribed, is still kept in Feedburner.

However to add the gadget to your blog again, you need to use Feedburner's gadget tool to make sure that you access the feed that you created when you added the gadget the first time around.

(Thanks to reader +Mary Bostow whose question got me thinking about this.)

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Related Articles:

Why RSS is important for your blog,

How to get a list of people who are subscribed to your blog by email

An alternative to "Follow-by-email":  giving your blog a subscribe by email option using Feedburner.

Customizing Feedburners verification message

Ditulis jackcode Pada 03.31.00 Komentar

Feedflare lets you add social tools to your RSS feed

Feedflare lets you add social tools to your RSS feed

Article Feedburner RSS Social Networking ZZ - needs 2013 review

This article is about using Feedburner's tools for adding interactive features and social networking links to your RSS feed items.

What is FeedFlare useful for?

Many bloggers spend a lot of time making social sharing features available on-screen in their blog - using things like Facebook's share button, follow-me on Twitter, etc.

But all this effort is lost on people who view your blog via an RSS feedreader.  All they see is the content that's sent through your feed:  they don't see any gadgets at all, unless they click-through to look at your blog.

If your feed is being managed with Feedburner, then the FeedFlare tools let you add social networking and interactive links to each post that you send out in your feed.   Unlike your blog, you can't control where they're put or how they look.  But many people believe that having them in a limited form is a lot better than not having them at all.

Currently the tools that can be added using FeedFlare include

• Email the author
• Post to Facebook
• Post to Digg This
• Save to del.ic.ious
• Discuss on Newsvine
• Stumble! it
• Add to Mixx!

Note that Twitter isn't currently included.


Turning on the FeedFlare for your feed:

Log in to Feedburner, using the Google account that owns the feed


Click on the name of the feed you want to work with.

Choose the Optimize tab

Click on FeedFlare in the left hand navigation bar.

This opens a list of the options that can currently be turned on using the FeedFlare function - as show in the picture below.
Note:  this list has expanded during recent months, it's worth checking back occasionally to see if something you would find useful has been added.

Tick the items that you want to use in the column headed "Feed".   Each thing that you tick will show up at the bottom of each feed item when it's viewed in an RSS reader.
Many (or even all) item-names can be clicked on to show a more detailed explanation of what the item is about.  eg clicking on "Comments Count (Blogger" reveals the explanation "Lists the number of comments posted to an item. This FeedFlare works with Blogger-based feeds only."

The Personal Feed Flare section lets you add more Flare items, either by choosing from Feedburner's catalogue or by building your own using Feedburner's API.
I'm not doing to discuss these options here, except to note that

• Potentially this tool can be used to add your custom items (eg an eBook that you have written) to your feed, so they're available to subscribers.  (I may devote a future article to this)

• Many of the items in Feedburner's catalog but not on their main list were developed by 3rd party developers - as with other widgets and templates, I'm very reluctant to recommend using them, because of the lack of assurance that they do exactly - and only - what they claim to.

When you are happy with the options selected, click Activate to start the service - or click Save if you have adjusted the flare options.

You will know that the change has been made because the word Feedflare (in the left navigation bar) has a small tick beside it.   Check for this - it's very easy to miss the Activate button because it's at the bottom of the screen and you have to scroll to get to it.

Job Done!


Note:  There is also a column headed Site.   This lets you generate code to put the items ticked into your website, and t he "on Site" section at the bottom of the screen gives you  the HTML code to put FeedFlare for the ticked items onto your site, and has (slightly out-of-date) instructions for how to install the code into Blogger.    I'm not recommending this, because there are now plenty of articles about how to put better-looking and more functional items into your blog.


What your readers see:

How your reader see posts when they view them with a feed reader depends on their own browser settings (as always), and also on specific the feed reader software they're using (Google Reader, Bloglines, etc).

The picture below shows the bottom of my Blogger-Hints-and-Tips feed, when viewed in Google reader.   The items selected in FeedFlare are shown as bullet-ed items.  Underneath that, Google Reader also has some other links too.

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Related Articles: 



Making a Feedburner feed for your blog

Putting a subscribe to me feed option on to your blog

Tools for linking Blogger and the Social Networking sites

Adding a Tweet button to your blog

Linking your blog and the social networks

Putting a badge for a Facebook page into your blog

Ditulis jackcode Pada 20.07.00 Komentar

Getting started with Feedburner

Getting started with Feedburner

Article Feedburner RSS ZZ - needs 2013 review

This article is about how to set up Feedburner to produce a feed from a blog.  It is targetted at Blogger users, but most of the information applies to other types of blogs and webpages too.

Overview

Previously I've explained why an RSS feed is important to bloggers,

Feedburner is one option for addressing the limitations of Blogger's "native" feeds.

And although it's owned by Google now, it was originally a different company so isn't quite the same as good to set up.   

That said, getting started with Feedburner is actually very simple. You just:

• "burn" (ie create) a feed from your blog (or other website), 
• put something in your website that lets your visitors choose to subscribe to your feed.

This article is about the first step, creating the feed.

Burning a Feed in Feedburner

Follow these steps:

1  Go to Feedburner:  http://www.feedburner.com/

2  Log in, using the same Google account that owns your blog.

Feedburner doesn't enforce this:  you can burn feeds for websites, blogs etc that you don't own.   But if you are interested in managing the rights of your blog overall, and in particular if you may want to give it to someone else to manage, it's very helpful if the same account owns all the components in your blog.

NOTE:  if you have added the Follow-by-email gadget to your blog, then you will already have created a feedburner "feed" for it.    You can find out if there is one by looking on the screen that's shown when you log in to Feedburner.   If you do have a feed then you may want to continue using it, rather than set up a new one.


3  Enter your blog's URL in the "Burn a feed right this instant" field

4  Press Next

5  Choose a feed source:

Because Blogger's current standard is to provide two feeds for each blog (one in Atom format, one in RSS format), Feedburner will show you a message saying "Feedburner discovered more than one feed at that address", and asking you which one you want to use.

Currently, I don't know any advantages of using either one, so I generally leave it on the default (ie first) option.

6  On the next screen, you can change the suggested values for the the feed's title and part of it's URL.  

• The title is the name that the feed will be known as in your Feedburner account.
  It's possible to burn more than one feed from the same blog, if you want different features on different feeds.  If you're going to do this, make sure you use names that are meaningful to you.
• The URL is the one that feed-subscribers need to enter into their feed-reader-software to subscribe to your feed:  this isn't normally seen by human-beings so doesn't need to be meaningful - Feedburner generally makes it a "tiny-URL" style of abbreviation.

7  Feedburner then creates your new feed, and shows you a congratulations message.

This message includes the name of the feed.  Theoretically you could share this with your audience, but I've noticed that sometimes it has extra spaces it in.   It's far better to wait and use the tools from the Publicize tab to share your feed with your viewers.

8  You are given the option of adding some extra free statistics:  I generally turn these on because they're free and I haven't found any reason not to have them.  

(You could turn them off if you viewers complain that your feed is slow to work with, but it doesn't usually seem to happen.)

Next steps

Just creating a feed from Feedburner isn't actually very useful - your blog was already publishing feeds anyway.  The benefits come from using Feedburners tools to promote, manage and monitor use of your feed.   You can access these from the main Feedburner screen, which is where you are taken after your feed is made.  The options are grouped into the Optimize, Publicize, Moneytize and Troubleshootize tabs.   

Feedburner sometimes shows some "cute" phrases on the screen, and uses quirky words to describe things, eg "troubleshootize".   This is because the product was originally totally separate from Google and the company developed its own way of doing things.  When Google took over, some things become more standard, but this wasn't one of them.

There are lots of things you can do with your feed.  But the first and most important steps are:

• Making your Feedburner feed available on your blog
• Making an email-subscription available on your blog

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Related Articles:

Components in your blog

Why an RSS feed is important to bloggers

The Follow-by-email gadget:  an easy way to make a feed from your blog

Making your Feedburner feed available on your blog

Making an email-subscription available on your blog

Providing social proof, by enabling the Feedcount button

Understanding Google accounts

Tools for applying copyright protection to your blog

Putting a Facebook "Share this" badge on your blog.

Ditulis jackcode Pada 06.31.00 Komentar

Understanding the Follow-by-Email gadget and Feedburner

Understanding the Follow-by-Email gadget and Feedburner

Article Email Feedburner Following Gadgets RSS ZZ - needs 2013 review

The Follow-by-email gadget is built on top of Feedburner's email-subscription service.   It's very easy to add to your blog, but there are some things that you need to think about if you are using it to deliver posts to your followers by email.

Adding the "Follow by Email" gadget
The Follow-by-Email gadget is a very simple way to give your readers access to blog-updates by email: it delivers a message in their inbox every day that you post.

But to decide if it's a good thing to use, to get good value from it, and to troubleshoot any problems, you need to understand a little more about how it works.

And, since it uses Feedburner, this means understanding how Feedburner works.

What is Feedburner:

The Follow by Email gadget uses a product called Feedburner to manage the list of subscribers. 
This started as a tool to enhance the RSS subscribtions that website-owners delivered - see Why RSS / Subscribe to Posts is important for your blog  for info about RSS.   Very roughly speaking, every time a website publishes a new item, Feedburner adds that item to a "feed" or summary of the site, and tells all the subscribers about it, without the subscribers having to visit the website.

One option that Feedburner added was subscribe-by-email:  website owners who use Feedburner for this have to turn the service on, and then put "something" on their website that offers the service to people who want to get emailed updates.   To start with, Feedburner just kept a list of emails addresses, but now it's more sophisticated and checking with addresses that they really do want to be subscribed before adding them to the list, and offers un-subscribe option with each subscription email.

Adding the follow-by-email option to your blog sets this up for you:  it sets up a feed, turns the email service "on", and puts an email-capturing box onto your blog.   


What is set up when you add the gadget:

You put the Follow-by-email gadget onto your blog the same way you would add any other gadget.

This means that, you are logged in to a Google account at the time.

If that Google account already owns an entry (ie a "feed") in Feedburner for the blog you're adding the gadget to, then the gadget just uses this feed.

But if the Google account doesn't currently have an entry from the blog, then a new feed is created, and the email service is turned on for it.:

• The Feed Title is based on the blog's name.  
• The feed address appears to be fairly random (eg I created one for a blog called "Another test blog", and the feed name is    http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/meaUW

Advantages of the Follow-by-email gadget:

This gadget makes it a lot easier to offer a follow-by-email option:  you don't have to set up the feed yourself, or use a HTML-gadget to provide a subscribe-by-email form.

And because it uses Feedburner, you have full access to Feedburner's statistics, and a number of other things that are included in Feedburner's features, including:

• Customizing the "click the link to subscribe" message, 
• Getting a list of all your email subscribers (verified and unverified), and 
• Configuring the look-and-feel (including timing and from-address) of the daily email to your follow-by-emailers. 

Disadvantages of the Follow-by-email gadget:

There are some disadvantages of both the gadget, and the approach that Blogger has used to implement it:

• Google / Blogger have mixed up the words "subscribers" and "followers".  It used to be that subscribers used RSS gadgets (from Feedburner or other feed-providers), and followers used Blogger's own following-tools.   But this new gadget is called "follow-by-email", and it's possible that mixing up the ideas will make some people very confused.

• Using the gadget, you have very little control over the look and feel of the  follow-by-email option on your blog.  
  
  Compare this to the "Get updates by email" option which is in the top of the sidebar on this blog:  I've put a lot of effort into getting the wording "just right" so potential subscribers know that they will be getting a please-confirm email.   This on-screen wording means that even if they don't act on the email immediately, they get another reminder about if they come back to the blog again in the future.
• You have no control over the message that potential follow-by-emailers are shown to tell them to verify their subscription.  It looks like this
  
  
  
  While this message is fine for the tech-minded people who are likely subscribe to an RSS feed, it will probably bring a glazed look to those of your visitors who need a very simple subscribe-by-email option!  

• People who follow your blog by email will not be included in your Followers gadget or count - though you can use the Feedcount button to show how many subscribers your blog has.  

• People who subscribe to your blog by email don't see any of the widgets on your blog, or any advertisements.   (Unlike regular RSS-feed subscribers for whom you can set up AdSense for feeds).  Despite the options mentioned above, ou have very little control over how they see your messages, especially if they happen to be using email software that shows your messages in plain text.

Related Articles: 



Customizing the "click the link to subscribe" message
 
Getting a list of all your email subscribers

Why RSS / Subscribe to Posts is important for your blog

The Follow-by-Email gadget:  a very simple way to give your readers access to blog-updates by email

Ditulis jackcode Pada 20.01.00 Komentar