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GOOD WEDNESDAY MORNING! Okay fine, so its the afternoon already. GAH! Do you KNOW how long these posts take to write? *grumble*grumble*

Today we are talking about feeds, as in RSS Feeds. We will learn what feeds are, why they are relevant to blogging, how to burn your own feed, and then how to use a feed plugin to direct any feed burned off your blog to FeedBurner.

If you’ve stumbled upon WordPress Wednesdays for the first time, you can easily catch-up to where we are today by going through the WordPress Wednesdays Archives. There have only been three tutorials to date, so you aren’t far behind!

Are you settled in and ready? Have your drink of choice? Good let’s do it.

What is a Feed?

According to Wikipedia…

A Web Feed is a data format used for providing users with frequently updated content. Content distributors syndicate a web feed, thereby allowing users to subscribe to it.

In other words, as the internet has become more dynamic and website owners have realized that stale, static content is about as interesting as watching a fence post, website owners are updating their content more frequently.

By burning a feed for your site, and making it available to your site visitors (also called “syndicating”), you give your site visitors a way to easily receive updates every single time you post fresh content; all they have to do is subscribe to your feed. Think of your feed as your own TV Channel in Browser-ville. There are many different channels available, but your channel plays you and you alone.

Today I will show you how to burn an RSS Feed. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” or “Rich Site Summary”; cute, no? RSS Feeds are typically used to publish blog content, news headlines, and/or podcasts. The RSS Feed will either contain the full text or a summary of the published content.

Why are RSS Feeds Relevant to Blogging?

RSS Feeds make it possible for your site visitors to keep up with yours and others’ blogs automatically. No longer do they have to “favorite” or “bookmark” your URL in their browser and manually click to it to check for updates. Nope, it is so much easier. Avid blog readers use services called feed readers, or aggregators, to handle subscriptions to multiple blogs at one time. They log into their feed reader and can instantly see who has updated and who has not. If you have an RSS Feed you will have more returning readers; it is that simple.

I prefer Google Reader as my feed reader. I’m able to categorize my feeds with tags. So, if I want to read the updates from the tech blogs I like, I will scroll down in my feed reader to see if any of them updated their content. I have over 100 blogs in my feed reader at any given time. Some of my tags are “friends”, “blogher”, “craft”, “DIY”, “flickr”, “photoshop”, “wordpress”, and many others. I even have a tag called “sampling” for blogs I’m not sure I’ll stick with, but want to try out, for a few of their updates to see if they’ll keep my interest.

Burning a feed is appropriate netiquette (Internet Etiquette). It is a nicety. It is a service for your readers. You give them an easy way to keep up with your fresh content and they just might return the favor by returning time and time again.

Doesn’t WordPress Have a Built-In Feed?

Yes. WordPress, by default, comes with various feeds. If you already have an active WordPress blog, and you have not burned your own feed yet, then you may have site visitors subscribed to any one of the built-in WordPress Feeds.

How did they grab your feed? Most likely your WordPress theme came outfitted with either a text-link that says RSS Feed or it has the Standard RSS Feed icon (the orange icon you see highlighted in the image below).

Whichever one you have, if you have users subscribed to the default WordPress feed on your blog, it is because they clicked on a feed icon, a feed link, or just grabbed the feed using a feed reader.

If you use your mouse and rollover the default RSS Feed icon or text-link at WordPress Wednesdays, you can see my default WordPress Feed.

As you can see above, the default feed for www.wordpresswednesdays.com is

http://wordpresswednesdays.com/feed

If my site visitors click on it, they’ll see different formats of my feed, depending on the browser thy are using.

If they are using Firefox, it will resemble this:

If they are using Safari, it will resemble this:

If they are using IE 7.0, it will resemble this:

These are just a few of the browsers they may be using. But the point is, THIS is the way any feed will display when clicked on your WordPress blog.

Using the built-in WordPress default feed isn’t a bad thing, but if you want to optimize, analyze or eventually monetize your feeds, you will need to use a third-party software to burn a feed, and then install it within the code of your WordPress template. This is called customizing your feed.

Burning or Customizing Your Feed

Let’s get on over to www.FeedBurner.com and burn our customized feed.

On the home page at FeedBurner you’ll see it says, “Start FeedBurning Now. Type your feed or blog URL below.” Key your blog’s URL into the text box given, as I’ve done below and click the “Next” button.

After you click the “Next” button, you will be brought to the page where you can either accept the feed automatically assigned by FeedBurner (they get this from the title of your blog), or you can customize it.

You can see that FeedBurner auto-assigned me the Feed Address:

http://feeds.FeedBurner.com/WordPressWednesdays

That is not the Feed Address I desire, so I made a modification to the text in the box so it would read

Create your account by giving a username, password and email address and click the “Activate Feed” button to continue.

Whoohooo! You now have a customized RSS Feed for your blog. Click the “Next” button to, as they say, “Dress it up a little”.

FeedBurner doesn’t assume you’ll want all your stats, but … um … get them. It is FREE! FREE! FREE!

Below, I’ve highlighted the options I’ve selected for www.wordpresswednesdays.com. I don’t offer podcasts, so I didn’t check that option.

Click on the “Next” button once you’ve selected your options.

Now that your Customized RSS Feed is burned, you need to integrate it into your Self-Hosted WordPress blog. This is made easy for you through a plugin. Easy Squeezy!

Click the blue looooooooong text link that says, “Use this plugin to help direct your feed traffic through FeedBurner”

A Pop-up window will open and tell you all about the FeedBurner FeedSmith. The FeedBurner Feedsmith basically takes any built-in WordPress RSS Feed and directs it to FeedBurner. One thing you will learn about WordPress – there are a gazillion people that are working EVERY SINGLE DAY to make it better and you? YOU BENEFIT from their work. Can I hear an AMEN for open source software?

Click the blue text link that says Download the plugin

Select that you want to “Save to Disk” and another window will pop-up allowing you to browse on your hard drive for what directory you want to save the plugin in. I ALWAYS save the plugin inside my /plugins/ directory so I can have a back-up of the plugin if ever I need it.

Within my /wordpresswednesdays/ directory on my hard drive, I click through /wp-content/ and see the directory for /plugins/ and I will save the FeedBurner Feedsmith zip file in there.

Remember, you need to go to the directory on your hard drive, right-click and select to “Extract All” from the zipped file you downloaded.

Follow through the steps to extract it in the same directory. If you don’t remember how to extract a zipped file, there are directions within last week’s post when we extracted the zip file of a theme and uploaded it to our /themes/ directory on the server.

The pop-up window at FeedBurner gives Installation directions for the plugin that are easy to follow. We’ll walk through them together.

1. “Copy the plugin file, FeedBurner_FeedSmith_Plugin.php into your default WordPress plugin directory, wp-content/plugins/”

What they mean by “Copy the plugin file” is that you must upload the file to your server’s /plugins/ directory. Remember how we did this last week? We uploaded a new theme to our /themes/ file using Filezilla. The SAME EXACT STEPS are used to upload a plugin to your /plugins/ directory on your server.

Your /plugins/ directory is located right above your /themes/ directory within the /wp-content/ directory on your server. So, again … review last week’s tutorial on how to upload a file to the server and then, upload the FeedBurner_FeedSmith_Plugin.php file ONLY into the /plugins/ directory on the server.

PLEASE NOTE: You are NOT placing the entire /FeedBurner_feedsmith_plugin_2.2/ directory on the server! ONLY the file within it called FeedBurner_FeedSmith_Plugin.php will be uploaded.

2. “Activate the plugin by logging into your WordPress administration area, clicking Plugins, then clicking Activate at the end of the ‘FeedBurner FeedSmith’ row”.

This is pretty self-explanatory, but let me give you some images to make it easier. Once you log into your WordPress Dashboard (Found at: http://www.yourblog.com/wp-admin ), scroll across the horizontal menu text links at top and click on “Plugins”.

You are now in the “Plugins Management” area of your WordPress blog. Scroll down the list of Plugins to find “FeedBurner Feedsmith” and then look to the far right for the text link, “Activate”. Click it.

Once you click the text link, “Activate” you will see a yellow horizontal bar up top and the words “Plugin Activated” will appear.

As the yellow horizontal bar fades away, you can look down at your plugin and see the table’s color has changed and now the text link you clicked says, “Deactivate”. That means your FeedBurner Feedsmith plugin is active.

Continuing on with FeedBurner’s instructions…

3. “In the WordPress administration area, begin the configuration by clicking Options and then the FeedBurner FeedSmith sub-option.”

So, here we go…from the Plugins Management window, click on the text link up top for “Options”.

Still looking at the text links above, within the “Options” window, click on the text link that says “FeedBurner”.

4. “Follow the links to create your FeedBurner feeds, or if they already exist, simply fill in their URLs in the boxes provided.”

We have already created our FeedBurner feeds, so now we just need to fill in their URLs in the boxes provided on our WordPress blog. This tells our WordPress blog what our feed is so it can redirect any other built-in feeds to our new, customized feed.

Now that you are in the “FeedBurner Plugin” window, you need to enter the URL for the feed you burned earlier as I did below.

5. “Verify your URLs in the text entry fields, and click Save.”

Easy enough. Done. You will see the yellow bar up top light up yellow and fade out, leaving the text, “Your settings have been saved.”

6. “Now, all of your WordPress feed traffic should be redirected to FeedBurner.”

Weeeeeeee!

Now that your blog’s feed is slicker than a goose poop, I’ve got ONE MORE THING to show you.

Summary or Full Text

If you are already familiar with using a Feed Reader to read your subscribed blog feeds, you may have noticed that some feeds show the full posts and some only show a summary.

I am not going to tell you whether to select “Full Text” or “Summary”, but I will tell you my personal opinion on the matter.

I think it is rude to burn only a “Summary” to your feed. It is a “tease” and well, I don’t like it. By only showing a Summary you are trying to control your subscribers’ reading experience. The Summary forces the reader to click through to your blog to continue reading “the rest of the post”. In other words, instead of allowing your reader to decide whether or not they want to visit your blog, you’re forcing them to do it. Eeek!

Whenever I subscribe to someone who only burns the Summary, I unsubscribe. Why? Because I read MOST blogs within my Google Reader. I do not click thru to blogs unless I want to comment. There is no way I can go to every blog I’d like to read on a daily basis. The Google Reader allows me to see more, but even then, I’m limited. So, when someone only offers me a Summary, thereby trying to force me to click through to their blog to read, it irritates me and I don’t subscribe.

There are other views on the matter. Here’s some reading fodder for you.

• Full vs Summar Feeds: Mosty a Matter of Taste
• Full Text vs Summary Feeds
• Full or Partial RSS Feeds: The Great Feed Debate

Now that I’ve exposed you to other opinions, I’m going to show you WHERE in your WordPress blog you need to go to either set your feed to Full Text or Summary.

Log into your WordPress blog’s Dashboard and select “Options” from the horizontal nav bar.

From the “Options” window, click on the text link “Reading” to open the “Reading Options” window.

In the “Reading Options” window scroll down to the sub-header “Syndication Feeds” and check the radio button for either “Full Text” or “Summary” and then scroll to the bottom of the page to click the button, “Update Options”.

As you can see in the image above, I had not yet changed mine to “Full Text”. WordPress defaults to “Summary”.

A yellow horizontal bar will appear and then fade up top to let you know your Options have been updated.

This has been a long one, and I lied up there when I said I only have one more thing to show you. I actually have yet another thing to show you. I’ll post it later this week as a sort of “update”. I want to show you how to update your header.php file and any FEED text links on your blog to show your actual FeedBurner feed and not any default built-in feed. So, look for that in a couple of days.

Glad you stuck it out to the end.

Comments are for your questions!