Feeds | TECHRENA dot Net

[How To] Add RSS Feed Autodiscovery To Your Site

January 2, 2011January 2, 2011 by bharath

Almost every website offers updates via RSS feeds these days. This is the fastest way to notify the readers about the updates in the site. When it comes to blogs, blogging platforms like Blogger, WordPress etc. enable RSS feeds by default and the RSS feed autodiscovery would also be enabled in most cases. But at times what can happen is the tiny code that enables the RSS autodiscovery may go missing and the RSS feed can’t be discovered automatically.

How to find whether RSS autodiscovery is enabled?

Just open your website or blog in the browser (Firefox or Internet Explorer).

Firefox:

If the RSS feed icon appears in the address bar, your site has RSS autodiscovery enabled.

If you don’t see the RSS feed icon, it means that RSS autodiscovery is disabled.

Internet Explorer:

The RSS feed button will be in bright color when your site has RSS autodiscovery:

The feed icon will be greyed out when feed autodiscovery is not enabled:

Clicking on the icon will show the available subscription options.

Enable RSS Autodiscovery:

Just add the following code to your site header to enable the RSS autodiscovery:

In general, if you are using Feedburner, the code would look like:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="Feedburner Feed" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/feedburner-id" />

Replace “feedburner-id” with your Feedburner ID.

If you are using WordPress, add the following code to your header.php file.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0"href="<?php bloginfo(‘rss2_url’); ?>" />

Just refresh your site after adding the code and you should now see the RSS autodiscovery being enabled:

Remove Google Analytics Tags In Your Blog Posts and Feedburner URL

February 2, 2010February 1, 2010 by dennis

Feedburner is an amazing tool for managing RSS and atom feeds. Many of us use this service for burning our own feeds, may be from our own sites and blogs. We can also use the email subscription feature and integrate the feeds with Google Adsense.

Recently Feedburner has enabled Google Analytics to analyze the feeds, clicks and track them. But when we use this feature to track the feeds, we have found out one problem. We had enabled this feature in our Blog and the URLs of our posts included the Google Analytics tracking tags like “utm_source=feedburner &utm_medium=feed &utm_campaign=Feed%3A “ . An example of such URL can be seen below:

Original URL:

http://www.techrena.net/internet/google-nexus-one-launch-jan-5-price-530/

URL indexed in Google after enabling tracking:

http://www.techrena.net/internet/google-nexus-one-launch-jan-5-price-530/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TechrenaDotNet+(TECHRENA+dot+Net)

There are some problems incorporated in such kind of URLs. The main problem is that the Search Engine Optimized(SEO) URL has been changed and indexed. Another thing is that duplicate URLs of the same content may be indexed and your Google ranking may decrease or may stop crawling of your posts. It may lead to a broken link also.

SOLUTION:

The solution is very simple. Follow the steps below:

Step 1: Login to Feedburner.

Step 2: In the Analyze tab, click Configure Stats

Step 3: Uncheck the Track clicks as a traffic source in Google Analytics Check Box

Step 4: SAVE it.

Now you have successfully disabled Google Analytics tags in your post URLs.

If you are done with this, you can read our previous post about finding number of email subscribers to your feeds.

Reader New Feature: Track Changes In A ‘Website Not Offering Feeds’ Using Google Reader

March 2, 2010January 28, 2010 by bharath

The Problem:

Your favourite website doesn’t offer updates via feeds.So you can’t follow the latest changes in the site.

The Solution:

1.There is popular Page2RSS, that creates RSS feeds for any webpage whenever there’s an update to the page.

2.Now Google Reader has also implemented very similar feature that let’s you keep track of the changes in any website as RSS feeds in the reader.

How To Do This?

Open Google Reader and click “Add Subscription” just enter the URL of the website (or webpage) that you want to keep track.Google Reader will automatically generate the feed for it (if it can’t detect any RSS feed).

That’s it, you can now see the changes/ updates of that website in your Google reader feed items.

For some sample feeds generated through this, read this post from Google reader blog.