Feedburner Tutorial: Replace your blog Atom/RSS Autodiscovery feed with Feedburner
Feedburner is an amazing feed management service offering plethora of features like:» How many people have subscribed to your blog ?
» Desktop or Web based RSS client - How are people reading your blog ?
» Which posts are more popular among your readers (Click Through Tracking)
» Your RSS feeds look like a neat website when viewed in a web browser outside an RSS client
» You can control whether you want to syndicate full feeds or partial feeds, including number of words
» Feedburner lets your monetize the RSS feeds
» When your change your web address in future (including the default XML feed), the change will be transparent to your RSS subscribers
» Feedburner supports both RSS and Atom Formats
» Feedburner lets you insert your Flickr pictures or del.icio.us links automatically in your feeds.
» Feedburner Pingshot automatically pings major blog engines like Technorati as soon as you post new content.
» Feedburner is integrated with FeedBlitz and recently launched their own Feedburner Email - an RSS to email service.
For the above reasons, I recommend bloggers to switch from the default blogspot.com Atom based XML feeds to Feedburner. That gives you more control over you feed and an idea about your RSS subscribers - It is otherwise impossible to determine how many people have downloaded or subscribed to your Atom XML feeds since the server access is restricted.
Here's a short tutorial for those willing to take the plunge from Blogger Atom to Feedburner. I have been using it successfully on my blog for some time now and very pleased with the results.
Step 1: Create a feedburner account and type your blog feed address (abc.blogspot.com/atom.xml). Next choose the Feedburner Feed Address and click Activate Feed.
Step 2: Congrats, your Feedburner Blogger Feed is now ready. Now we will replace the Blogger feed with Feedburner by modifying the autodiscovery HTML tags in your Blogger site template. Don't be frightened of the jargon - it's a very simple process.
Step 3: Search for the <$BlogMetaData$> Template tag in your template. It is responsible for adding all the meta information related to XML feeds in your blog. We will replace it with Feedburner.
Step 4: While you edit the blog template, make a note of the Blog ID available in the browser address bar
www.blogger.com/template-edit.g?blogID=12345
Step 5: Delete the BlogMetaData tag and replace it with the following text carefully. Substitute "Blog Title" with the actual Blog name, yyyy with the number your noted in Step 4, xxxx with your feedburner address.
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" />
<meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="true" />
<meta name="generator" content="Blogger" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Blog Title" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/xxxx" />
<link rel="service.post" type="application/atom+xml" title="Blog Title" href="https://www.blogger.com/atom/yyyy" />
<link rel="EditURI" type="application/rsd+xml" title="RSD" href="http://www.blogger.com/rsd.g?blogID=yyyy" />
<style type="text/css">
@import url("http://www.blogger.com/dyn-css/authorization.css?blogID=yyyy");
</style>
Step 6: Do a preview. If you have the latest version of Google Toolbar or use Firefox, you will see the RSS icon activated. Click it to test the location of your feed. If everythings works as expected, click "Save Template changes" and republish your blog.
The above steps are for blogs hosted on the Blogger blogspot domain. If you are on Wordpress, MovableType or a different blog platform, you may want to consult the corresponding MetaData tags for replacing the blog RSS feed with Feedburner.
MSN Spaces and Yahoo 360° won't let you change the autodiscovery tags to feedburner but you can always setup an alternate RSS feed and promote it on the main website.
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Reader Comments:
Amit - I'm a big fan of your blog and it's a really rocking one.
Can you help me with this problem I'm facing on Feedburner ? This is the error I get - "The URL you entered does not appear to be a valid feed. We encountered the following problem: Error on line 131: The prefix "st1" for element "st1:city" is not bound."
In fact even on blogger, when I click on the Atom.xl link, this is the error I get - "XML Parsing Error: prefix not bound to a namespace Location: http://citymusing.blogspot.com/atom.xml Line Number 131, Column 1:st1:city^"
I mailed blogger but as expected, they didn't respond.
The funny part is that the RSS works perfectly on bloglines and other readers (even google), i.e. that if I add my blog to the bloglines "add" tab, it picks up the feed directly. What it means is that I can't display that "+RSS" button on my blog. Appreciate your help, thanks a lot.
When you send a mail to blogger and get an automated response, always email them back. they are most likely to help.
Ok - Are you publishing full feeds or partial feed.
Try doing a full feed and republish the index files only.
I guess it is associated with some corrupt blog entry.
If that doesn't help, maybe post a question here.
http://groups.google.com/group/blogger-help
Amit - thanks for that lightning response. I've posted the qt on the google group and hope to get a response soon. Thanks.
what if something happens to the company feedburner.com Won't it be over dependence on them if we change autodection feed?
Cheers, Rohit
rohit, i work at feedburner. we allow you to keep your own url - our "mybrand" service. or, if you use a feeds.fb.com url and you want to leave, we will redirect requests to your original feed address. we want to make it very easy for you to keep control of your feed and leave if you want. let me know if you have any questions...thanks. don
Don, thanks for the clarification. Appreciate it.
this worked like a charm!! thank you. i tried other sites but never got to succeed.
What if my blog is in beta version?
i can't seem to find it working...
what if my blog is in bete version, and under own domain?
gHi Amit,
I have been using feedburner for a while, however, it required me to look at your blog to get more sense out of the autodiscovery.
I have a question, though. I had to delete
@import url("http://www.blogger.com/dyn-css/authorization.css?blogID=yyyy");
.......
to get the blogs in the way they appeared earlier.
The question is if,
1) Import URL is for a custom button on your toolbar
2) Or, it helps with autodiscovery. My original metadata tag didnt have this particular tag.
Will appreciate to know your thoughts.
This is a wonderful site, MANY THANKS!!! Do these instructions work with the New Blogger? I tried them and it bombed, but it may be me.
I want to use Feedburner with happinesshabit.blogspot.com but I'm having trouble getting it to work.
Can you post updated instructions for the New Blogger? THANKS SO MUCH!!!
Now that Pro version is free, I tried out MyBrand.
But is there a way to get http://feeds.feedburner.com/myFeedName redirected to http://feeds.my-domain.com/myFeedName ?
This way we can have http://feeds.my-domain.com/myFeedName as the only feed url.
@anjanesh: That is exactly what MyBrand does! In reverse, acutally. Your URL will point to the FeedBurner URL.
For example, my blog is at http://blog.nogoodatcoding.com ( originally at http://nogoodatcoding.blogspot.com ).
My feeds are http://feeds.nogoodatcoding.com/nogoodatcoding and http://feeds.nogoodatcoding.com/nogoodtipsandtricks where these were http://feeds.feedburner.com/nogoodatcoding and http://feeds.feedburner.com/nogoodtipsandtricks originally.
What you need to do is simply setup a CNAME ( the "feeds" in feeds.your-domain-name.com ) and point it to http://feeds.feedburner.com. ( you may or may not require the '.' at the end ).
Then, you need to inform FeedBurner of this so that it will accept incoming requests for this URL and give them the data from your original FeedBurner feed URL.
This way, whenever someone types in http://feeds.your-domain-name-here.com, they get sent to http://feeds.feedburner.com.
So if you currently have two feeds which are available as:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/myAwesomeFeed and http://feeds.feedburner.com/mySecondAwesomeFeed, this setting will make them available as http://feeds.your-domain-name-here.com/myAwesomeFeed and http://feeds.your-domain-name-here.com/mySecondAwesomeFeed.
Note that ALL your feeds, with their original FeedBurner URLs will be now available at http://feeds.your-domain-name-here.com. It's a global setting. You do not need to configure individual feeds, you only configure the initial part of the URL, the domain. The trailing part of it, the feed's name, is the same as what you set it up on FeedBurner initially.
@no.good.at.coding :
What I meant was - why is the original feedburner link http://feeds.feedburner.com/username still working when I've changed it to MyBrand ? Shouldnt it redirect to the MyBrand link ?
For example : I want http://feeds.feedburner.com/anjanesh to redirect to http://rss.anjanesh.net/anjanesh just the way http://anjanesh.blogspot.com/rss.xml redirects to http://rss.anjanesh.net/anjanesh
@anjanesh: I see what you mean and as I mentioned earlier, it actually works the other way round: your MyBrand URL redirects to the FeedBurner URL.
FeedBurner offers the service so the final URL that will be redirected/ forwarded to has to be their own, on their own servers, which is http://feeds.feedburner.com/anjanesh, in your case. This 'base' feed URL will always be active, as long as you're using FeedBurner. MyBrand lets you specify a custom URL that will redirect to this base feed address and NOT a custom URL to redirect to.
So basically, you can tell the FeedBurner server, "I'm setting up feeds.anjanesh.net as a CNAME pointing to FeedBurner and I'm putting up http://rss.anjanesh.net/anjanesh for my subscribers to use as my feed URL. So any requests you get for that URL ( feeds.anjanesh.net ) have been correctly redirected to you and you should pick the feed name ( anjanesh ) and use that on the FeedBurner feeds base URL ( http://feeds.feedburner.com ) to serve up my correct, always active, base feed ( http://feeds.feedburner.com/anjanesh)."
Simply put, the MyBrand feature lets you hide the fact that you're using FeedBurner, it lets you set an alias for your feed URL. All your subscribers see is http://feeds.anjanesh.net/anjanesh so they have no idea that you're getting your feeds from FeedBurner. But if they knew, they could always access your base feed on FeedBurner.
This ( MyBrand URL redirecting to FeedBurner ) also has the added advantage that if tomorrow you should decide to change your feed service, you simply need to change the host to which your CNAME points, to the new service ( if available ). All your subscribers should continue to get the feed on your custom URL without disruption.
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