Adding RSS Feed to Wordpress in conjunction with
FeedBurner / Wordpress add-to-any-subscribe plugin
I received a comment today from one of my blog readers. That he
likes my blog content but he looks for a way to subscribe to my
blog.
Though I had a subscription button configured in my wordpress
template of choice. The button is located on place in the template
that is absolutely unnoticable (at the bottom of the page). This is
by the way I believe a default behaviour in case if the default
wordpress plugin is used.
Thus I decided to set a clear RSS Subscription button on my
blog.
Though at a first glimpse the task looked quite trivial it happened
to be a way more complex!
I've tried a number of things before I can succeed in adding an RSS
button.
The most simple though not really flexible way was through:
Wordpress's Widgets (Using the RSS Widget) .
This approach however has one major inconvenience.
Using the default wordpress RSS Widget you cannot configure the
Widget to keep displaying 0 items of the feed.
In other words you cannot configure from the the sliding menu
reading:
How many items would you like to display? 0 in order
to prevent completely showing up of any of the feed on the
page.
If you leave it with one. The RSS icon of RSS widget would point
directly to your blog instead to the RSS feed configured.
So in practice configuring it especially in my case rendered
completely useless.
The appearing link from the default RSS widget for some weird
reason doesn't includes a link to where my feed is located
http://pc-freak.net/blog/feed/
In the meantime I looked online to look for something that will
facilitate me in completing the simple task to add an RSS Subscribe
Feed to my Blog.
I asked for help in freenode's irc network #wordpress channel. And
a guy from there suggested that I go with
wp-o-matic
wordpress plugin
Anyways It took me a few minutes to realize this plugin is
suitabile if you want to show other blogs feed to your blog instead
of adding a RSS feed link to your own blog, this wasn't my goal so
I skipped next in looking for something to help me on.
In the meantime I found the interesting
feedburner google feed service that
is able to help in creating, publishing and distributing RSS &
Atom feeds.
I recommend you check it if you still haven't. It takes only a few
clicks to register in order to use feedburner as a feed
service.
Once you are set-up with Feedburner, you can activate all the cool
functions, such as allowing your readers to subscribe via email,
and also the Feedburner Flares.
Another nice thing about using feedburner is that it formats your
fed content in a really pretty layout. By the way since the 2004
feedburner is owned by Google. So in a certain terms using
feedburner instead of the default wordpress blog feed will probably
attract more google visitors to your blog and is generally good for
your blog placement in search engines.
For more of the advantages check
feedburner's google service website
.
However there is one major disadvantage in using the feedburner's
feed service. Using the service rob you out of control of your
feed, since all the feeds will be properly generated and formatted
from feedburner.
The newly created service for feedburner by me
is located on
www.feeds.feedburner.com/hip0
Now to be able to use the newly installed feedburner service with
my blog I had to test a couple of plugins before I came to the ones
that really worked.
I played with
feedburner_feedsmith_plugin ,
feedburner-widget ,
feedlist.2.61 ,
wp-keiths-easy-rss ,
rss-atom-avatar but I couldn't
make any of them work properly with feedburner. Some of the up
mentioned plugins were a real hell to configure so I completely
abandondoned them seeing their inflexibility. Others were
completely abondonede for more than 2 years from now, etc. etc.
Fundamentally none of them worked for me.
I finally was able to bring up the feedburner service on my
worpdress using
The
FD Feedburner plugin
All necessery to enable the plugin after you download into
wordpress's
wp-content/plugins directory is to configure the
plugin from:
Plugins -> FeedBurner Configuration Here is the
screenshot on the FD Feedburner plugin configuration screen:
As you can see in the screenshot the plugin is really simple to
configure. All you need to provide it with is the url provided to
you by feedburner right after you register your blog for the
service.
Now as you will have your
http://www.yourwebsite.com/blog/feed/
be redirected to the feedburner's website generated feed for your
website by the
FD FeedBurner Wordpress Plugin all left
to be done is to provide a link on your blog to your blog
feed.
To accomplish this you will have to
download
the add-to-any-subscribe wordpress plugin.
Again installation of add-to-any-subscribe is a piece of cake, to
install follow
The install instructions here
Now hopefully your feedburner feed will be able to be distrubuted
to your visitors via the AddtoAny subscription button on your
blog.