WebDiggin.com: An Adventure to Make Money Online

Is your RSS feed set up correctly for your website? If not, you might be losing potential repeat visitors. Sure, you’ve got that link for feedburner in your sidebar, but do you have autodiscovery turned on correctly? Do you have the RSS symbol showing up in your web browser? And, even if the RSS symbol is there, is it working properly?

Take two seconds to check your website with both internet explorer and firefox. Does the RSS button light up? Good. Now click on it and see if you go to your feed. If you go to your feed, great, you can skip this post. If there’s an error, you need to read on.

Internet Explorer:

Firefox:

We made a mistake setting up the RSS syndicated feeds for some of our blogs. Sure the little icons indicating that we had a RSS feed were showing up in Internet Explore and Firefox, but when you clicked on the button, you got a message saying there was an error.

The problem for us can be seen in the address bar. The actual feed should be

http://feeds.feedburner.com/ripplesofkindness 

But there is an error in our template so it thinks the feed is

http://ripplesofkindness.com/feed/feeds.feedburner.com/ripplesofkindness

Maybe it was an error in our wordpress feedburner options page. We tried changing things, but nothing happened. I know there are technical gurus out there who could correctly change the php code in our template header to fix this problem, but we couldn’t figure it out. So we used the brute force method.

Pete Freitag has an excellent post on how to make sure your blog feed is set up for autodiscovery. He gives specific instructions about how adding one line of code inside the head tag of your template will “make it easier for people to subscribe to your RSS feed.”:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS Feed for petefreitag.com" href="/rss/" mce_href="/rss/" />

So, we just went into all of our templates and found this line of code and replaced the href=”/rss/” mce_href=”/rss/” with the location of our exact feed

href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/ripplesofkindness“

In fact, I think this is why we’re having problems signing up some of our blogs with blogcatalog. The BlogCatalog sign-up form explains the following:

BlogCatalog uses Autodiscovery to determine your Blog’s RSS Feed. Please allow up to 2 hours for your site to be crawled for new RSS data

So now our little RSS feed button lights up and works properly. Phew.

Bottom Line: Make sure your internet browser shows the RSS feed symbol when you visit your site. But more importantly, click on the symbol to see if you go to the right feed page.

(1 votes, Rating: 5 out of 5)

 Loading ...