RSS/Feedburner Questions
-
I recently moved my blog over from Blogger and have my own .com address.
First, what is the point of having an RSS widget in your sidebar when you already have one included in the template?
Second, when I click on “Feed on Posts” in the template, all I get is this message: “This XML file does not appear to have any style information associated with it. The document tree is shown below.” and a bunch of code. How to people sign up to subscribe to your feed?
Third, how does Feedburner play into all this? My Feedburner feed just looks like a bunch of code now, and it says my site visitors are 0 even though my dashboard says I’ve had 68 hits or something?
Sorry, I’m just not getting all of this…
-
The RSS widget is so that you can show other peoples blogs on your site. You may want to try this feed: yourblog.com/feed , WordPress does not support javascript that feedbuner uses, hope that helps!
-
When I try yourblog.com/feed, it gives me the same message and code.
When I try yourblog.wordpress.com/feed, it takes me to yourblog.com/feed and gives me the message and code.
Am I not able to use Feedburner anymore?
-
The RSS widget displays the feed of other sites on your blog in your sidebar. For example, I have the AP political feed in my sidebar.
And yes, you can use feedburner. orbvab is not correct on that. I use it for my own feed. However, the template you have chosen has the feed button coded to your wordpress.com feed (in this case, your domain-mapped wordpress.com feed) and you cannot change that over to your feedburner feed. I had no trouble opening your feed (http://financegetspersonal.com/feed/) in a feed reader.
If you want to use your feedburner feed, you are going to have to chose a template that does not show the hard-coded feed icon and put your feedburner feed into a text widget.
-
To answer your first question, most themes at WordPress.com don’t have the feed button built in. Most people add it later, either in a text widget or an RSS widget.
The code of your Feedburner link in the sidebar looks like this:
<a href="%E2%80%9Dhttp://financegetspersonal.wordpress.com/feed%E2%80%9D"><img src="%E2%80%9Dhttp://faq.files.wordpress.com/2006/11/c64.png%E2%80%9D"></a>Which looks like it needs a bit of cleaning up.
-
The RSS feed widget will display the latest posts in a chosen feed in the sidebar so that people can click on the post titles to be taken to that post feed. The feed buttons in some of the themes here take you to the wordpress feed page for your blog.
You could put a link in a text widget in your sidebar to take people to your feedburner feed or even use an image as the link using this FAQ as a guide: http://faq.wordpress.com/2006/10/23/put-your-feed-in-your-sidebar/
-
One more thing – unless I am misstaken, feedburner doesn’t track onsite views, like the wp.com stats do. It only tracks those who are looking at your feed in a feedreader or who get the email. (And the wp.com stats are not visitors, they are page views.)
-
Last comment – I just looked at feedburner again. In order to track page views/visitors, you have to put code on your blog that we cannot use here since it contains javascript.
-
Jeez…
Since I can see my blogstats in WordPress now, I don’t really care if I use Feedburner. But how can you tell how many people are subscribing to your feed (non-feedburner)?
And, is there anyway to tell if the feedburner feed is still working for the 4 people that had signed up for it (if I lose them, it’s not that big of a deal)? But I think the Feedburner feed is what’s being delivered to Technorati, etc. Are there any issues I should know of by not showing my feedburner feed in the wordpress blog?
-
You can’t tell how many people are subscribing to your feed. And whatever you write is being sent to Technorati.
I’m not aware of any issues by not showing your feed on your blog. Not sure if you need to update your feedburner feed with the new blog url, though.
-
OK. I have told Feedburner where my new “original feed” is (www.financegetspersonal.wordpress.com/feed), so I guess everything’s OK.
Will people who are subscribing to my blog (non-feedburner) still show up in my blogstats as visitors or whatever?
-
No, they don’t appear on the main stats page at all. WP.com doesn’t aggregate feed readers at all. Where they DO show up is the graph for each individual post, so if you click the graph next to any of your posts on the Stat Page under Top Posts, you’ll get an aggregate graph which shows your regular readers and the RSS readers as an overlay, but just for that post.
I’m not really sure how much utility that has. I’d far rather see it aggregated for the entire blog. Would save time, too. We used to have that functionality, but haven’t for about a year.
-
Looking at the comments so far, is it fair to say that, if you have a WP-hosted blog, you can’t alter the location of your feed? I tried to follow the advice at
http://haris.tv/2007/05/10/setup-your-wordpress-blog-with-feedburner
but I think this refers to self-hosted WP blogs. vivianpaige states that
“If you want to use your feedburner feed, you are going to have to chose a template that does not show the hard-coded feed icon and put your feedburner feed into a text widget.”
However, this seems like an unsatisfactory solution as browsers will not be able to auto discover your feed. What we really need is to edit the template itself, and change the “<link rel=”alternate” … /> tag. Is this possible for WP-hosted blogs?
- The topic ‘RSS/Feedburner Questions’ is closed to new replies.
WordPress.com Forums 