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WordPress Wednesdays: The Rest of the RSS Story
10-3-2007 · 9 Comments
Last week’s WordPress Wednesdays’ tutorial was about RSS Feeds; what feeds are, why they are relevant to blogging, how to burn your blog’s feed, and finally, how to use a fabulously smart feed plugin to direct any feed burned-off your blog to FeedBurner.
There was one additional thing I was going to post in a mini-update this week, but time got away from me. After looking over it, I realized it really couldn’t be a mini-update as it packs its own punch.
So, here it is now … and y’all will just have to bear with another RSS Feed post. However, don’t despair because THIS IS IMPORTANT. Getting squared away with your blog’s RSS Feed is both beneficial to you and to your readers. YOU are better able to access your traffic cycles (growth or decline) and your site visitors are able to easily keep up with you no matter where or how they happen to grab the feed off your site.
Because of the FeedBurner Feedsmith plugin we installed last week all your blog’s RSS feed will burn-off to your new FeedBurner account, BUT for an anal retentive a detail oriented person like me, there is more to do. I personally want all of my feed to BE the same, and not just be pointed in the same direction. After all, didn’t I burn off a customized blog feed? Exactly.
Check your Autodiscovery links
I’m going to show you how to modify your “Autodiscovery” links within your blog’s <head> tags to point to your customized feed.
First, go to your FeedBurner account. The URL, in case you’ve forgotten, is www.feedburner.com. You will need to remember your own username and password that you set up last week.
Once you log in you’ll be here:
Ah, isn’t that sweet? I already have one (1) subscriber over at WordPress Wednesdays. Oh wait, that would be me. Never mind.
Click on your blog’s name (the blue text-link) to get to the Feed Stats Dashboard.
Once you click in through the blue text-link, you are in the “Analyze” window (the first tab). Look across the tabs to the right for the tab that says “Publicize” and click on it.
Now scroll down to the grey sub-header that says “Help Your Feed Find its Way”
and look for the text in the image below. Click on the blue link that says, “…modifying the auto-discovery tags”.
That will take you to this FeedBurner Forums page.
This FeedBurner thread is very informative. I would suggest you read it over, but for the time being, just scroll to this:
Most of the time you’ll be working within a WordPress theme that has this block of code:
And you’ll replace it with this exact code:
The top inserted code shows what is default to some, not all, WordPress themes. My theme did not come with all the code that they show above (I’ll show you what I do have in a bit.).
Why is this change necessary? Just because you’ve installed the Feedsmith FeedBurner plugin does NOT mean everyone who comes to your blog is getting your customized burned feed. It only means when they do subscribe, it is being redirected to FeedBurner.
YOU WANT everyone who comes to your page to use the FeedBurner version, but when syndication is involved (what it’s called when someone subscribes to your feed), there is this thing called “Autodiscovery”. And that means if you don’t “assign” your FeedBurner feed URL in your <head> tags, any of your site visitors can key in your site’s URL within their own feed readers and grab whatever default feed link their feed readers might discover.
It isn’t a huge change at all. It cleans up all those other unnecessary links and it streamlines everything to your customized feed.
How to Add Your Customized Feed within Your <head> Tags
Within the theme you chose and uploaded is a .php file called header.php. Because my hard drive has an exact copy of the files on my server, I can open the header.php file from my hard drive following this path:
wordpresswednesdays/wp-content/themes/mrtechie/header.php
Then, I’ll make the RSS Feed modification, per the directions above, using a text editor. DO NOT MANIPULATE .php FILES USING A WYSIWYG EDITOR - especially FrontPage; trust me on this one.
Using a text editor, I’ve opened up my WordPress theme’s header.php file and it looks like this (click the image below to enlarge).
Notice the highlighted line? That is the default WordPress feed. I don’t want that. I will paste my customized feed url into that line of code and it will then look like this (click the image below to enlarge):
Remember, my custom feed url is http://feeds.feedburner.com/wordpresswednesdays
Next, I need to save and upload (overwrite) the header.php into the correct directory on the server. If you need a refresher on how to upload files to the server using Filezilla, we did it two weeks ago when we uploaded themes.
If you are not comfortable making modifications to files within a text editor and uploading them using a FTP program, then you can make modifications to the files within your actual WordPress > Presentation > Theme Editor window.
How To Make Changes to Your Header.php File Within WordPress
Log into your WordPress Dashboard (http://yourblog.com/wp-admin)
Select “Presentation” from the horizontal nav bar.
Within the Theme Window, your Current Theme should be displayed as a large thumbnail. Now look in the second horizontal nav-bar (it is a darker, navy blue) and select the white text-link for “Theme Editor”.
Once in the Theme Editor window you will notice that the default file showing is your style.css. Look to the vertical navigation bar on the right and select “Header” - which is your header.php file.
Now the Theme Editor window should say either “Editing header.php” or “Browsing header.php”.
If your window says “Editing header.php” you’re good to go. Just look for the exact same block of code that I showed you in the images above and paste in your customized FeedBurner Feed URL. Then, scroll to the bottom of the page and click the button to “Update File”.
If your window says “Browsing header.php”, you will not have a button that says “Update File”, but instead you’ll have italicized text right directly under your editor’s window that says, “If this file were writable you could edit it.”.
Before you can make any changes to any of these files you have an additional step to take; making the files editable.
Making your Theme Editor Files Editable
Remember back when we changed the default file permissions to our .htaccess file? We’re going to do much the same thing here.
You’ll definitely need to have access to your server files - either through cPanel, the File Manager provided by your Web Host, or through an independent FTP like Filezilla. If you are on a PC, I recommend downloading and using Filezilla; they do not currently have any mac applications.
From this tutorial I wrote:
I use Filezilla which can be downloaded FOR FREE. If you follow that link and click on the “FileZilla_3.0.0_win32-setup.exe†text-link, it’ll begin the download. Ask it to save it to your desktop and run the install from there. It is quick and easy to use in accessing your server files.
Below I will detail how I make all the files within my theme, /mrtechie/, editable.
First, I open Filezilla, select my blog directory /wordpresswednesdays/ from the Site Manager (or set it up if you’ve not used Filezilla before), and once logged-in to the server, look for the /themes/ files in the right hand window (which is the server window).
Remember: When using Filezilla (or any independent FTP program), the directories and files in the left window are your hard drive files and the files and directories in the right window are your server directories and files.
I have to click through the following path on my server to get into the /mrtechie/ directory and set file permissions:
/public_html/wp-content/themes/mrtechie/
Once in, I will click ONCE on the first .php file (if you click twice, it will download it to your hard drive directory opened on the left), archive.php, hold down the SHIFT key on my keyboard, and then click on the very last file, style.css, before releasing the SHIFT key. This highlights all of them. See?
Then, I will right click with my mouse on the highlighted area and from the drop down menu, select “File Attributes”
The File Attributes window will open and I will key in ‘777′ and click “Okay” to save these file permissions.
That wasn’t hard, was it? And now I have the ability to edit any of my /mrtechie/ files within the Theme Editor at WordPress.
Now I can log back into WordPress, get on over to Presentation > Theme Editor, click again on “Header” from the right vertical navigation bar, and then make the modification for the RSS Feed that I instructed above (remember that above the edit box it should say “Editing header.php”).
Once the new RSS Feed URL has been pasted in, I’ll scroll to the bottom of the window and clicking “Update File”.
Done!
Replace Feed URLs Everywhere Else
If you look at WordPress Wednesdays, you’ll note that I also have a Feed Icon and a link that says “Subscribe to RSS Feed” in the top right corner of the screen. If I roll over that feed with my mouse right now, it’ll show the default WordPress feed in my browser’s status bar. I want to assign it the correct feed.
Fortunately, for me, I do this in the same file, header.php, as I just used to make the “Autodiscovery” changes within the <head> tag.
I looked for the code for the “Subscribe to RSS Feed” near my search bar, found it, and replaced the default WordPress RSS feed with my customized URL, http://feeds.feedburner.com/wordpresswednesdays.
(click the image below to enlarge)
You do this same kind of replacement within any other RSS Feed link you have in your blog. Usually they are found within the header.php or the sidebar.php.
Okay, I’m tuckered out - are you?
No, of course not. You are highly intelligent, completely capable and ready for the next tutorial, right?
Right? RIGHT?!
Good, then come back next week.
I PROMISE it will NOT be about RSS Feeds (or any other kind of feed, for that matter).
OMSH - how I do love a WordPress Wednesday. Because much like you, I am
anal retentivedetail oriented. Unlike you, however, I don’t have the patience to go wading through code to figure out what to do to “fix” the things I think are “wrong”. Your tutorials make it painless. It makes my black and tarry heart sing and maybe it’s even a little less black and tarry today. ;)Hey OMSH, I was playing with feedburner and wondered what are bots? Is it easy to explain or if it’s really complicated then I would probably be okay not knowing for I never would understand. ;)
Steph - I am glad that I can help you out. :)
Ang in TX - I think Wikipedia does an excellent job with their bot definition. :)
I’m not sure where you were reading about it, but at least you’ll know what they are! :)
Love it thanks. But, what about RSS comments? Is that something we should change. Not that I am worried about it, but it doesn’t match?
Just Beachy - If you want to run RSS for your comments, go into the WordPress backend in the Options > FeedBurner window.
Click on the text link that says “create a FeedBurner comments feed “ and follow through. It’ll take you to FeedBurner and you can burn your comments feed. I changed the textbox for mine to say /wordpresswednesdayscomments/.
Go back to your WordPress Options > FeedBurner window and enter the new feed in the textbox under #3.
Click to Save.
There ya go.
Trying to pack for our Thanksgiving trip (including a cross-border shopping trip!), so I will come back and read this later.
You are my computer (and many things) hero.
xoxoxoxoxo
I nominated you for a ‘You make me smile” award. Check out my blog to see what it is about.
[...] is for Anal-retentive. OMSH prefers to use the term “detail-oriented”, and usually I agree with her. But I needed an A, and that was the first one that popped into my [...]
Cool! I just did it, was easy! I didn’t even know there was such a thing as Feedburner. I thought I was stuck with what I had.
I moved over from Blogger to Wordpress back in August and I used to be able to put an image with my feed. But I couldn’t figure out how to do it with Wordpress. That is until today and I read your wonderful post! Thank you!!
But I’m confused about something. All my old feed subscribers. What happens to them? Do the old feeds still get updated? Because when I moved to Wordpress I tried to get my subscribers to change over. Didn’t happen.
And that autodiscovery thing. Let me see if I’m understanding this correctly. It makes it so new subscribers only see one feed to subscribe to. So if I try to subscribe I should only see one choice and not two?
Thank you again!! This is AWESOME!
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