Friday, June 29, 2007

Burn it..! with Feed Burner

Months before I started writing influenced by a small pdf file (extracts of a famous blog ) I received... That was in malayalam , one of the regional languages in India. I went through the same and then clicked on the title which led me to a site with lots of boxes around. I installed the font and started reading.. then suddenly i saw the create blog link on the top of it.. rest was history...
No one was there with me, to teach me what to do, how to proceed.. i patiently went ahead read them all.. started experimenting.. and am here.. writing on a notepad ++ and posting directly into the blogger... In the initial days it was a facination to see my stuffs getting listed in the blogg rolls.. then i realised (and accepted) the time lag between hitting the "publish" button and my stuffs appearing on the listing site.. I tried many a things and at last I went ahead and burnt my feed. the association was rather an accident one..

So.. What is feedburner? (Now a part of google)
In their own words Feedburner allows blog owners and podcasters the ability to manage their RSS feeds and track usage of their subscribers.

But before proceeding further .. what is a feed?
A "site feed" gives your readers a new way to read your updated blog entries. Instead of coming to your blog page each and everytime an update happens, they can see your entries as soon as they are published, using software for reading syndicated content called an aggregater "newsreader.". Combine this with RSS(Realy simple Syndication) confused? never mind...

Lets make it simple.. and let me speak this in blogger context...
Blogger has got two type of feeds..
1. Atom feed.
2. Rss feed.
Now simpler.. Lemme take myblogname as the name of the blog as an example then, we have two choices.
1. Atom : http://myblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default (myblogname.blogspot.com/atom.xml also works for atom)
2. RSS : http://myblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

I want to make this content to be dispersed in the web, that too in a faster way.. Here I used feed burner
Using feedburner was easy. the steps are..

1. Register in the site..
2. Give the name of the site (your blog address)
3. By giving the same feedburner will find the active feeds from the address. select the one of your choice(I prefer atom feed)
4. The next thing you can do is a little bit of customisation and getting the feed address..
eg: the feed address I have set in feed burner for this site is http://feeds.feedburner.com/BeautifulMinds
any one subscribing this will be redirected to add in their reader(like google yahoo etc.) so here you got a subscription/ reader for your blog . Make sure that you are pulicizing the same with a link/button in the prominent place.

This is not a tutorial.. but is a small description. If you tried to burn your feed and then make it available then you can try customising that as well bcos feed burner have got a very nice and descriptive tutorial for each and every steps you can perform. and tips are available here
* you can also make the readers sign in for an email subscription. feed burner will email your contents once a day when you make a change.

All this for free..!!



3 comments:

eagerblogger said...

I am actually new to all these and I have a hard time understanding how I can have my own rss feed.

eagerblogger said...

Oh, thanks for the help. I will definitely give it a try. I am always asked about my rss feed and I don't really know what to put. I'm a little slow with reagards to these things. :)

Areekkodan | അരീക്കോടന്‍ said...

A very nice post ...
It helped me burn my own...
Nice and simple description...
Many many thanx...

Post a Comment

Post your comments(yeah u get a free link with that)... Here..! for Beautiful Minds


*even though the anonymous comment option is available, please do comment with a name(not key words) and URL, if found spam, the comments may get removed.