Easy Publishing of WordPress Blogs RSS Feeds With FeedBurner
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) Feeds are a modern form of content distribution or publishing: the newest content on a website is automatically delivered to the users directly in a web browser or their favorite feed reader, without being the need to access a certain URL. Many current frameworks or content management systems have built in the necessary code that permits the automatic inclusion of the newest added content into the RSS or atom feed. Practically, the RSS feed is created on the fly based on a certain code or module (the user does not have to make it manually).
If you have a WordPress based blog, the RSS feeds are generated by a certain PHP code existing in the template structure. In various situations, depending on the template structure, the link to the RSS feeds might not be visible for the users. By default it can be located at an URL like http://www.yoursitename.com/wp-rss.php or if you use custom permalinks, http://www.yoursitename.com/feed/.
In order to make visible the RSS feed subscription link to the website users, as well as the latest feeds, the FeedBurner RSS feeds publishing service is a simple to use alternative. This web based service has many advantages: it provides to the user the possibility to subscribe to the feeds by using their preffered feed reader, offers to the blog administrator detailed statistics regarding the traffic and number of subscribers, ensures an optimal compatibility of the feed with various feed readers and more.
First, you must create a FeedBurner account, then identify the link to your WordPress blog feed (the FeedBurner service has also a feed autodiscovery feature if you only provide the blog URL). After you define the feed in FeedBurner account, then a link for the readers to subscribe to it must be published in the blog (publishing the RSS subscription link the side-bar is recommended). From the Publicize tab in your FeedBurner account, a convenient icon (icons) can be selected. The corresponding HTML code is generated automatically.
In the WordPress blog side-bar, a new text widget that allows you to publish text or insert various codes, must be added from the Dashbord Widget section, by selecting the Design tab menu from the main menu. After the pasting of the HTML code generated by FeedBurner and pressing the save button, you will find in the side bar one or more icons that will correspond to certain RSS feed subscription options. The simplicity of this rapid management method of WordPress blogs internal RSS feeds could save the time of both beginners as well as advanced webmasters.
