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Saturday, January 29, 2005

How To: Add a Feedburner RSS 2.0 Feed to your blogger blog

At feedburner.com you can create a link for your blog that will allow people to subscribe to your audio/video feeds.

Update 9/23/05 : Feedburner has updated their pages so some of this might be a little different.

Feevlog has a video tutorial on how to add an RSS 2.0 feed.

1. From blogger, grab your RSS or ATOM feed and copy it.

To do this, sign onto your Blogger account, click on the Settings tab, and then click Site Feed.

Then where it says, "Site Feed URL", you'll see something that looks like this:

http://offonatangent.blogspot.com/rss/offonatangent.xml

Copy that.

2. Go to feedburner.com and paste it into the box that says, "Enter your feed's address to start improving it now!"


3. SKIP THE SMARTFEED option and FIND THE SMARTCAST choice.

Choose the SmartCast™ option. Choose any other options that you might want and then click, "Update Feed."

Make sure that SmartCast is enabled in FeedBurner, not SmartFeed.

They're different:

- SmartCast helps enable podcasts by adding the enclosure element.

Repeat this to your self five times beofore clicking anything over at Feedburner.com:

SmartCast
SmartCast
SmartCast
SmartCast
SmartCast

4. Next, under the "Actions" menu on the left, choose "Publicize..."

5. Choose, "Start the Chicklet Chooser »"

6. Select the Feddburner Feed link you want to display on your site and copy that code:

<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/SteveGarfieldsVideoBlog" title="Subscribe to my feed" rel="enclosure"><img src="http://www.feedburner.com/fb/images/pub/xml_button.gif" style="border:0"/>.</a>

Which will display as this:


Site vistors can then control-click, or right-click on this image to copy your RSS 2.0 feed, and paste that feed into their feedreader, to subscribe to it.

7. Got back to blogger and click on your "Template" menu tab.

8. If you scroll down to the bottom, there probably some code in there for a blogger tag.

Just after that, paste in the feedburner code and click "Save template Changes."

Note: It's a good practice to put this 'Chicklet' on your sidebar.

9. Then click where it says, " You must [ Republish ] your blog to see the changes. "
10. Now the last step to make sure feedburner picks up your video blog enclosures is to put a special HTML tag, rel="enclosure", in your posts that include video.

If you directly link to your video from your blog post, you use this:

<a href="http://www.website.com/video.mov" rel="enclosure">My Video</a>

If you link to another page that has your video in it, you add a SECRET link for Feedburner to use and it should look like this:

<a href="http://www.website.com/video.mov"" rel="enclosure"></a>

The address for the QuickTime file needs to be absolute, like in this example with the http://www.website.com/ in front of your movie name.

All this really means is that you need to add [ rel="enclosure" ] to the link to your video.

Note:
Even though this is the 10th and last step, it's important, and can mess everything up if you don't type in the HTML code for the enclosure tag in the exact way as shown above.

Please, take a deep breath and take the time to do it right. Even long time web coding experts have typed things like enclosures instead of enclosure.

Good luck.

NOW visitors to your site can subscribe to your videos by control-clicking, or right-clicking on the Feedburner chicklet image, copying your RSS 2.0 feed, and pasting that feed into their feedreader.

That sounds like another lesson. ;-)