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[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:

RSS Subscription Extension For Google Chrome

March 31, 2010 by bharath

Unlike most of the other browsers like Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer or Opera, Google Chrome doesn’t automatically gives a quick way to subscribe to RSS feeds in a web page with a single click.

If are very much used to the other browsers then you might be feeling inconvenient in Google Chrome due to lack of this quick RSS feeds subscription feature.

Well, if you are just worrying about this missing RSS subscriptions support, you should look at this great extension “RSS Subscription Extension” developed by Google.

This extension auto-detects RSS feeds on the page you are reading and upon finding one will display an RSS icon in the Omnibox, allowing you to click on it to preview the feed content and subscribe.

Also the extension has 4 predefined web-based feed readers (Google Reader, iGoogle, Bloglines, My Yahoo).However you can add any web-based feed reader of your choice to this list.

Here’s how any website offering RSS feeds will look like after installing this extension.Observe the RSS icon in the Omnibox.

Download RSS Subscription Extension for Chrome

Adding Your Feed Subscriptions Windows 7 Feed Headlines Sidebar Gadget

March 26, 2010 by bharath

If you are using either Windows 7 or Windows Vista, you might be knowing about a desktop sidebar widget called “Feed Headlines”.By default this gadget will show pre-loaded RSS feeds from various popular news and other websites like MSN, CNN etc.,.But have you ever thought about controlling these feeds adding your own feed subscriptions from your favorite RSS feed reader instead ??

That would be great, right? Here we are going to show how to setup your “Feed Headlines” gadget to show feeds from your feed subscriptions (using OPML file) :

Pre-requisite: An OPML file exported from your RSS feed reader

Step 1: Open your Internet Explorer (possibly Internet explorer 8), find a button called “Favorites” and click on it to expand its options.

Step 2: As shown in the following screen shot, find “Import and Export” option from the menu.

Step 3: Choose the option “Import from a file” in the next window.

Step 4: In the next step, you will be asked “What would you like to import? ”, select the option “Feeds”.

Step 5: Now locate the “OPML” file that you have got from your favorite feed reader.(Read the guide to export as OPML from feed readers).

Step 6: Select a destination folder for your imported feeds and click “Next”.

Step 7: Now you have successfully imported your feed subscriptions from a feed reader.

Step 8: Go to your Feed Headlines gadget and choose the feed subscriptions folders from which you want your gadget to display feeds.

That’s it from the settings side, now go check your feed headlines gadget, which is supposed to show feeds as shown here in the following screen shot.

This is a simple and straight forward process.However if you face any difficulties while doing this, let me know through your comments.

[How-To] Exporting Your RSS Reader[Google Reader & Other] Feed Subscriptions As OPML File

March 23, 2010 by bharath

This isn’t our conventional ‘How-To’ article, but still some readers who are just beginners of RSS feed readers/ aggregators may want to know these little things about importing/ exporting feeds in OPML format.

OPML stands for Outline Processor Markup Language.This is now being used for exchanging list of web feeds between various web feed aggregators.In this small tutorial, we are going to explain how exactly this importing and exporting via OPML is done.

Importing / exporting feeds in Google Reader:

Navigate to “Import/Export” tab under settings

Now here you can find options to export your subscriptions as an OPML file or import your existing subscriptions OPML file.Isn’t it simple ??

FeedDemon & RSS Bandit :

FeedDemon is the popular RSS feed aggregator for desktops which supports synchronization with Google Reader.

Importing and exporting feed subscriptions as OPML files is a lot easier in these readers.You can directly access “Import Feeds/ Export Feeds” options under “File” menu.

Similarly in Rss Bandit, you can Import Feed or Export feeds from the “File” menu,or suing shortcuts Ctrl + I or Ctrl + E.

Is your operating system is Windows 7/Windows Vista? If so, you can use “Feed Headlines” gadget show feeds from your feed subscriptions.Stay tuned to this blog to know how to do it.

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.

Find Out Number Of Email Subscribers To Your Site Feeds In FeedBurner

January 22, 2010 by bharath

FeedBurner is the service I use for serving RSS feeds of my blog to our readers as most of the others, FeedBurner being the most popular feed service in town.One feature that I most like in FeedBurner is its ability to offer RSS feeds via Email to those who have subscribed to the site RSS feeds by entering their email address.

FeedBurner keeps sending your newest posts as emails to the subscribers using your email address as “from” address whenever you add new content to your site.

But how to keep track of the number of users who have subscribed via email to your feeds?

Well, the number that FeedBurner shows in “Subscribers’ list isn’t actually the total no of email subscribers, keep in mind that it also includes those who have subscribed using other RSS readers and news aggregators.

I just dug into this to know how to find the real number of email subscribers of my blog feeds.

Thankfully FeedBurner does show this number but this may not appear to common FeedBurner users like me at first sight.Ok, let me show you where in the world you find this number.

STEPS:

Go to Publicize Tab from your feed stats dashboard.

Click ‘”Email Subscriptions” link under “Services’ menu

Find “Subscription Management” link under this menu

Under Subscriber Management section, you can see the “Total Subscribers”.Now this is the number we wanted, this is the actual number of email subscribers of your feeds.

You can also search your subscribers list or you may export your subscribers list as CSV (Comma-Separated Values) file.

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