Using FeedBurner and RSS Autodiscovery Tags
If you use FeedBurner to create a custom feed for your blog, you need to change the autodiscovery tags in the HTML <head> section of the blog template or theme. Here’s why.
FeedBurner makes a special URL for your RSS/Atom feed that people can use to subscribe to your blog content, or to receive your posts as an email message. FeedBurner also gives you the ability to track the number of people that subscribe.
The special URL looks something like this:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/[your blog name] or
http://feeds.feedburner.com/WebMarketingProBlog
The latter is the FeedBurner feed URL for the McBuzz Web Marketing Pro Blog. If you click on the “Subscribe” link in the sidebar to the right, that’s the URL that will appear in the address window of your browser. FeedBurner then shows you a page that gives you options as to how to subscribe to the feed.
The HTML tag for the “Subscribe” link looks like this:
<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/WebMarketingProBlog" title="Subscribe to Mark McLaren's Web Marketing Pro Blog" rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml">Subscribe</a>
You can put this link anywhere in your template, and people will be able to click on it and subscribe to your blog.
The problem is, most browsers have an “autodiscovery” feature for RSS/Atom feeds, AND most blog templates have standard HTML tags in the <head> section of the page that facilitate this. Putting your new FeedBurner link in your blog’s sidebar does not change the tags in the <head> section of the page. In most cases, you need to do this by hand.
Here’s what the old RSS/Atom feed tags looked like for the Web Marketing Pro Blog:
<link rel="alternate" type="text/xml" title="RSS .92" href="<?php bloginfo('rss_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom 0.3" href="<?php bloginfo('atom_url'); ?>" />
I replaced these with the following:
<link href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/WebMarketingProBlog" title="Subscribe to Mark McLaren's Web Marketing Pro Blog" rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml">
Now when a browser autodetects my blog’s feed, it finds the right URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/WebMarketingProBlog
You can check to see if the old tags are still in your template by using View > Source or View > Page Source in your browser while you are on one of your blog’s pages. Look for something like the three link tags above.
If you use TypePad, here’s a discussion of what to look for and change:
http://snurl.com/2eiyh [groups_google_com]
And, if you use the Firefox browser, you can click on the orange RSS symbol in the address window to see the feeds that are being autodiscovered. If more than one feed is detected, Firefox should show you a dropdown menu with each of the options.
In the case of the three old feeds for the Web Marketing Pro Blog above, Firefox showed an option for each feed: RSS 1.0 (.92), RSS 2.0 and Atom. If only one feed is detected, you need to check your browser’s address window for the feed URL after you click on the orange RSS symbol. If you see your FeedBurner URL, you’re set. If you see something else, you need to change the tags in the <head> section of the page.
Clicking on the RSS link (circled in red) in Firefox will show you which feeds are being autodiscovered. If only one feed is being autodetected, you may need to look in your browser’s address window to see the URL after clicking on the link.
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