Here’s another thing I didn’t understand when I was just starting to out, but I signed up for it anyway. I even had a lot of trouble trying to put Feedburner’s “Subscribe Through E-mail” button and was only able to do it for guitartutee this month. Anyway, today is the day I will do it for BlueMumble.

There is no simpler way to explain feeds, or RSS feeds, than from this info by wikipedia. Here it goes.

RSS (formally “RDF Site Summary”, known colloquially as “Really Simple Syndication”) is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document, which is called a “feed”, “web feed”, or “channel”, contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that’s easier than checking them manually.

RSS content can be read using software called an “RSS reader”, “feed reader” or an “aggregator”. The user subscribes to a feed by entering the feed’s link into the reader or by clicking an RSS icon in a browser that initiates the subscription process. The reader checks the user’s subscribed feeds regularly for new content, downloading any updates that it finds.

Advantages:

  • gives you a way to track your subscribers(e-mails, number of)
  • makes your site look cool because it displays the number of readers button
  • gets your blog burned on the feed network and thus easily accessible to your subscribers
  • ability to advertise on the feeds with Google Adsense(haven’t tried it yet)
  • traffic analysis of your subscribers

Yuga himself has written so many articles on Feedburner already, and right now, if you visit his site, the e-mail subscribers are approaching 2000 people. That means whenever a new articles is posted in Yugatech, that many readers/aggregators know immediately. So join me and let’s sign up for Feedburner.

Steps in Signing and Setting Up For Feedburner

  1. Go to the Feedburner website.

  2. At the upper right corner of the page, click on Register. Create your Feedburner account.

  3. Sign in using your username and password.

  4. Create and burn your feed. Choose RSS 2.0 when asked. Usually I put the domain name as my feed address. Hence, BlueMumble’s feed look like this. http://feeds.feedburner.com/bluemumble Finish the sign-up process.

  5. Now it’s time to add the chicklets or the Feed icons on your website. Click on My Feeds at the upper left corner of the page. Click on your newly-created feed.

  6. Go to the Publicize tab. Then choose E-mail Subscriptions. Activate it. Copy-paste the html code to your template. Usually, I would put it under the Community sidebar(see on the right) and I would edit part of the code to suit my website.

  7. Go to Feedcount. Choose the color for your chicklet and again, copy paste the code to wherever you want to display the number of your subscribers.

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