Blogger RSS Feeds and Feedburner

Blogger RSS Feeds and Feedburner

In this article you will learn about Blogger Blogspot RSS feeds and about the benefits of burning your Blogger feeds at Feedburner. 

What are RSS Feeds? 

Your Blogger feeds are a means of distributing your blog content to the world. Feeds make it possible to maximise exposure of your blog's content beyond a few visitors browsing your blog. Feeds can be subscribed to via a web portal, news reader, or email. Feeds allow your blog content to be packaged into all sorts of widgets and gadgets and mobile devices that can be displayed just about anywhere.

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. RSS is a standardized web format used to create a document containing your blog posts, blog comments or any other content on your blog you choose including images, music and video. As Blogger has built in RSS feeds, everytime you publish a post Blogger automatically adds your post to the default feeds. How much of your Blogger post that is displayed in your feed depends on whether you have chosen your feed in full or short format. To check this setting in Blogger navigate to Settings > Site Feeds of your blog. 

Blogger automatically produces your blog's feed in both Atom and RSS. RSS is becoming increasingly popular as the preferred format for feeds. Both Atom and RSS were developed to enable people to receive automatic updates of their favorite blogs and websites. While the format of each is different they do pretty much the same job which is to output updated content from your blog in a format that can be easily read in a feed reader. 

The URL of Default Blogger Feeds

Default Blogger Post Feeds

Atom 1.0: 

http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default

RSS 2.0:

http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss 

Default Blogger Comments Feeds

Atom 1.0: 

http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default

RSS 2.0: 

http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default?alt=rss 

Default Blogger Label-Specific Feeds

Atom 1.0:

http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default/-/labelname 

RSS 2.0:

http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default?alt=rss/-/labelname

Encourage Visitors to Subscribe to Your Feeds

Whenever you see the familiar orange icon  on a website that denotes a RSS feed. By adding this RSS icon to your Blogger blog and setting up a link to your posts feed or other content visitors will be able to view your feed on click. If you have enabled the Subscription Links widget in Layout > Page Elements > Add a Gadget visitors are given the option to subscribe to both your posts and comments feeds in a reader such as Google Reader, My Yahoo or Bloglines. Alternatively you can burn your blog feeds with a free feedburning service like Feedburner.

Feed Readers Make it Easy for Readers to Keep Up-to-date

Your readers don't have to worry about manually saving your blog to their browser favorites anymore as Atom and RSS feeds make it easy to subscribe to a feed reader instead. Rather than visitors manually checking back on your site and trying to manage a bunch of bookmarks they can choose to subscribe to a reader. Subscribing in a reader means they will get up-to-the-minute content automatically without fear of missing any new entries.

Burn Your Blog Feeds with Feedburner

To make it even easier to get subscriptions to your blog it pays to burn your feeds with a feed burning service like Feedburner. The Feedburner service is now owned by Google and can accessed from your Google account. If you do intend to include Google Adsense on your feeds it is a good idea to burn your feeds. Please refer to my article Adding Google Adsense to Blogger RSS Feeds for help in setting up Google Adsense for your Blogger feeds. For assistance with burning your feed at Feedburner please see my article Burn Blogger RSS Feeds at Feedburner.