john-23things

Here's the Feed settings page on Blogger, under Settings > Site Feed.


I'm building a 23 things blog, & I'm going to explore RSS as Thing 8. This blog already has a great set of feeds attached to it, though, and so for my "interesting" free post Thing 7, I'm going to explore the feed options offered by Blogger, and run the default feed through Feedburner so that I can collect subscriber stats and add extra goodies to the feed.

If you want to leave your feed as-is, Blogger offers 3 feed options:

1. The posts feed, which can either be "full" or "short". A full feed includes the whole text of the post. A short feed only includes part of the post and encourages readers to click-through to your site to see the rest of your article.

2. A comment feed, which allows readers to subscribe and keep track of any new comments that are sent.

3. A per-post comment feed, which allows a commenter to subscribe to the comments thread of a given post (perhaps one that they've commented on) so that any replies show up in their reader.

Blogger also includes the option to redirect the post feed through an external third-party service such as Feedburner. This new option is introduced on the Feedburner blog. Previously making this change was a big deal and involved a lot of template editing. Now it seems pretty straightforward, & is well worth it.

If you're interested in "burning your feed," check out the Feedburner Blogger Quickstart. It's all very straightforward:

1. On the Feedburner front page, type your blog URL in the "Start Feedburning Now" box:


2. Some sites offer feeds in multiple formats. Select which feed you want to burn. It doesn't matter which one you pick for our purposes:


3a. Choose a title and Feedburner address for your feed.
3b. Set up a Feedburner account for yourself (username, e-mail and password is all that is required.)


Keep a note of the Feed address that is assigned to your feed. We'll need that for step 6.

4. You're mostly done in Feedburner... "Skip directly to feed management" to see your stats, unless you want to get into some of Feedburner's extra goodies. If you do, click "Next"


5. Choose which additional stats tracking services you'd like to activate

After you click "next" at this point, you'll get into some detailed Feed options. Your feed stats will be under the "analyze" tab. There are other useful tools under "optimize" and "publicize."

6. One more step. Go back into your Blogger account under Settings> Site Feed. Type or paste your Feedburner Feed Address (from step 3) into the "Post Feed Redirect URL" box, and save your settings. Now Blogger knows that you want your subscribers to access your feed after it has had the Feedburner treatment, and not before.

You're all set! Now you'll have stats and the option to add feedflare. A burned feed is a wonderful "thing #7", and a great addition to a 23 Things blog!