A question in the fuel forums has prompted me to revisit feeds and throw in subscriptions for good measure. It also reminded me to update our sidebar here.
decadentdiamond, new to fuelmyblog, asked how does she submit her feed URL to the feed us section on fuel? Where is her feed URL is another way of asking.
Feeds are often referred to as “XML” or “RSS” or “Atom”. And are often displayed like this:-
What these images are saying is that you can find out about updates to this blog (or website) without having to visit the site in your browser (internet explorer, firefox etc).
Subscribe means exactly what it says, your readers can ensure that never miss a post on your blog again, just like subscribing to a magazine.
In basic terms, what we are talking about is simply another way of reading a blog. The “normal” way is to visit each and every blog by clicking on your *ahem* fuelroll images.
People can subscribe to your “feed” or in real words, your new posts, by email (the email will arrive direct to their email folder) or by using their feed reader (looks a bit like when you open your emails), we explained using readers in TechTuesday a while ago, you can find the link at the bottom of this post.
Does my blog have a feed?
Many blog hosts publish your feed automatically, however, in my opinion, the easiest way of getting a feed URL for your blog is to sign up to Feedburner (click here). Feedburner is owned by Google and is a really simple to use website. When you click the above link, it takes you direct to their homepage, you’ll see various options, for a first time user simply type your blog URL ie this one is blog.fuelmyblog.com in the large empty bar. This will start the “burning” process and will automatically give you your own feed URL. Once you have this you are on the road to giving your readers new options.
Feedburner gives you many options, I will not cover each in detail as they do such a wonderful job on each page, a quick explanation of each tab on their site is below:-
Analyze - Shows you statistics on your readers.
Optimize - Make sure your feeds can be read by anyone.
Publicize - Make it easy for your readers to subscribe.
Monetize - Add adverts to your feed.
Troubleshootize - Help!
So now you’ll have your feed ready, all you now need to do is add your new “chicklets” (images with links) to your sidebar just like this:-
If you show the main feedburner image, it will give the reader many different subscription options, it also shows how many people subscribe. It is called Feedcount in the Publicize section:-
Don’t forget to offer subscription by email for the folks that don’t use a reader and prefer to receive an email every time you update, this is also available within feedburner and can look like this:-
Why add my feed to the fuelmyblog feed us here page?
As you now have a feed, you should show it off right? At the top right side of the fuelmyblog homepage we have a small box that displays feeds, this for me is a great way of glimpsing what is going on around the fuelosphere and we are working at making this more powerful. You can add your new feed here.
I hope you have found this post helpful, it reminded me to update our options on the right 
Clicking on the following highlighted text takes you to two more great resources:-
How do I use Google Feed Reader? by BenSpark on Fuelmyblog Blog
10 Ways You Can Use Feedreader to Improve Your Blog by The Viral Garden
4 Comments
Great primer on feeds Kevin, and great example of listening to your community!
Thanks Mack, yours is a great informative read.
Kevin
Another point is that as your feedreader displays only the content of your blog (ignoring all the authors layout and font decisions) you can ’skin’ or ‘theme’ your feedreader to display other peoples blogs and sites as you want to see them. This is particularly useful if you are a bit blind (like DP) and need to raise the font sizes up to 36+…
it looks like a nice site, thanks..