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You have set up a feed with feedburner. Now what ?
In the previous post in this multipost series (see part I and part II. here) I have presented the challenges of automating some of the repetitive blogging tasks that any serious or professional blogger is faced with, and in today’s post, I’ll try to show you some of the things that you have accomplished if you’ve set up your feed with google’s free Feedburner.
Now that you’ve set up a feed with feedburner (presumably, after reading my 2 previous posts about this), let’s see first of all, how do you set your blog to redirect your readers who access the blog’s original feed, to your new feedburner feed.
On blogger / blogspot blogs, your original feed would be at http://yourblogurl/atom.xml, or
http://yourblogurl/feeds/posts/default (insert your REAL blog URL [address] instead of “yourblogurl” ).
On worpress blogs, some of the most common feed addresses are http://yourblogurl/feed/atom or http://yourblogurl/feed , depending on whether you have or have not modified your template files, and do or do not use a plugin for creating a different feed then the default one.
On blogspot / blogger blogs, you need to sign in to your dashboard, select the small arrow that’s in front of the “View blog” button, (tooltip says “More options” if you just place your mouse cursor over it, and wait one second; see image 1.) , from the popup menu that appears, click on “Settings”.
In the settings screen that will load, click on “Other” in the lower-left corner of the screen (see image 2.) and in the screen that loads, fill the textbox of the feed redirect URL with the address of the feed you’ve just created using feedburner. Click on “Save” in the upper right corner of the screen.
From now on, whenever a visitor will try to access either of your default blog feeds, the blog will redirect that visitor to your newly set feedburner feed.
On wordpress blogs, redirecting your basic feed to a feedburner feed is a little more difficult to accomplish, since you have
to install a plugin to do that, but that’s not too hard to do if you’re familiar with plugins.
If you don’t already have a feed redirector plugin installed, sign in to your wordpress dashboard, in the left column (menu) click on “Plugins”, then click on “Add new”. In the form that loads, enter “FD Feedburner Plugin”, and click on “Search plugins” (Image 3). It will take a few seconds to locate the plugin in the wordpress plugins online database, depending on how fast your internet connection is (among other factors).
Once wordpress has located the plugin, click on “Install now” (image 4). WordPress will ask you to confirm the installation. After installation is complete, (usually, just a few seconds), click on “Activate plugin” (Image 5).
After activation, a new submenu entry will appear in your “Settings” menu in the left column. In the feed URL textbox, enter the address of your new feedburner feed (I also recommend checking the checkboxes of the options available, as seen in image 6.)
So hopefully, now that you’ve set up your feed redirection, every visitor that wants to access the RSS or atom feed of your blog, will be redirected to the feature-rich, customizable, smarter feed created by feedburner.
To see what customization options are available, and how can you accomplish a lot of automation with your new feedburner feed, please come back in a few days and check the next post, in which I’ll try to present how feedburner can make your blogging life a LOT easier and what are some of the most useful ways in which you can use the service.
And please leave a comment 🙂
