Syndicating Your Blogger.com Blog with a Site Feed
Creating a site feed for your BloggerTM weblog is one way to get the word out about your blog. Your readers can subscribe to your site feed, view the feed in their RSS reader and be notified when you have added to or updated your blog. There are only two steps to adding a site feed to your blog. First, you will set up the site feed in your Blogger account area. Then, you will add a link to your site feed to your blog template.
Set Up Site Feed
- Log into your Blogger account. Click on the Settings tab and choose Site Feed from the submenu.
- Publish Site Feed. This tells Blogger to create and then automatically update your site feed whenever you republish/update your blog. Set this to Yes.
- Descriptions. There are two types of descriptions that are displayed in the RSS reader. If you choose Full, the entire text for your blog entries will be shown. For the Short option, only the first 255 characters of the blog entry will be displayed and the rest truncated.
- Site Feed URL. This is the URL or web address that you will add to your blog template. As you can see, it is created from the URL of your weblog and then /atom.xml is placed at the end.
myblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml
The atom.xml file is your RSS site feed. Most of these feeds are coded using XML and an RSS reader program can read this XML code and display the site feed information. For more about weblogs and RSS Syndication, see the link below.
- Article Footer. You will use this box to add some footer text or your AdSenseTM code at the end of an entry listing. This footer text will appear at the end of the description for each blog entry listed in the site feed. As noted on this setup form, you must have the Descriptions setting set to Full (in this form) and the Enable Post Pages set to Yes (on the Archiving setup form). Now, you are ready to enter the text for your footer into the input box.
- Save and Republish. Click the Save Settings button to save your changes. When you get the confirmation page, click the Republish button at the top of the page.
Add Site Feed URL to Your Template
- Click on the Template tab and choose Edit Current from the submenu. We will put the RSS Site Feed link at the top of the sidebar. Of course, you can place this link anywhere you wish.
- Scroll down until you find the beginning of the sidebar section. Place the following code after the opening div tags.
<a href="https://myblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml">RSS Site Feed</a>
This code will place a link at the top of the sidebar. The visible text for the link will read RSS Site Feed. When your blog visitors click on this link, they will see something like this, depending on which web browser they are using. To view your feed in an RSS reader, they must right click on the link and copy/paste the URL into their RSS reader application.
- Save and republish again.
Screen shots reprinted by permission from Google Inc. GoogleTM, BloggerTM and BlogSpotTM are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Google Inc. in the United States and/or other countries. |
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