Hi, I’m J. Dock Myrick II and I’m the tech dude over here in the BlogBurst editorial star chamber. I thought it might be instructive to go over a few things about RSS feeds - since RSS is the main technology that allows BlogBurst to work. Also, since it’s important to have a full feed submitted to BlogBurst, I’ll cover a couple of things relevant to that.
Blogs and RSS
Most bloggers use a ready-made platform like Wordpress or Blogger, and the good news is that if you use a ready-made blog platform, your blog platform automatically creates RSS feeds for you. In broad terms, you’ll usually have an Atom feed and an RSS feed available to choose from, and in some cases even more. When you submit your blog to BlogBurst, you’ll see these choices in the drop-down menu during the sign-up process.
I recommend that you choose the latest version of your RSS feed, which will usually be RSS 2.0 or Atom 1.0. You probably do not want to choose RSS .092 or Atom 0.3, as these older standard feeds increasingly do not work as blogging platforms and browser standards continue to be upgraded over time.
(For more on RSS in general, I direct you to our friends at Wikipedia for more insight.)
Feedburner
Feedburner is a separate free service that allows you to channel an already existing feed, creating a new RSS feed. It’s easy, it’s free, and if you are having trouble with your feed doing odd things, Feedburner is a good choice for you. I would note that Feedburner can turn full feeds into partial feeds, but it cannot turn partial feeds into full feeds.
Controlling feed length
Every blog platform is different, but with very few exceptions (MySpace comes to mind); every blog’s RSS feed is capable of generating full feeds in the blog settings. Occasionally, after making the necessary changes to get a full feed, it takes posting a new post for the changes to actually take effect. Sometimes it even takes 24 hours, and in some cases you need to republish your feed. There are too many platforms to list all the instructions, but here are a few examples:
Wordpress - full feeds
Go into your Wordpress template and click the ‘Options’ menu tab. Under that click the ‘Reading’ subtab and you should see a place to change your settings for each article to show “full text” as opposed to “summary.” Click on Update Options to save.
BlogSpot / Blogger - full feeds
How to turn on full feeds:
1) Go to Blogger.com and sign into your blog to see the dashboard.
Click on the Settings tab and then on Site Feed in the sub menu underneath that tab.
4) Make sure to click on the Save Settings button at the bottom of that page to save the changes.
5) Sometimes, a useful next step is to go ahead and republish the blog.
6) ALSO, as a workaround - If you’re using an atom feed as your feed URL (http://blahblah/atom.xml) I’d change it to RSS 2.0 (http://blahblah/rss.xml) as these seem to work a lot better within the framework of Blogger.
Changing your BlogBurst feed in our system
If you find that you really just need to change the feed altogether (for instance, moving to a newer version of your feed) you should be able to do so in BlogBurst by choosing “Edit Blog Profile” under the “My Blogs” camp, then choose “Update URL” and change the feed URL.
Well, that’s it for now - I hope you found this instructive. Happy blogging!
- J. Dock, Editorial Tech Specialist
There are some interesting free tools that will convert a plain text RSS feed into a Podcast feed with embedded MP3 files. I use talkr.com and I’m pleased with the results so far.
Granted, the resulting “automated voice” may seem a little dull and lifeless when listening to a post, but it’s a valid alternative syndication format, and a low-maintenance way of converting any text blog into a podcast. Moreover, visually impaired visitors to your text blog will really appreciate having this option.
I’d be curious to know if any BlogBurst publishers have shown an interest in Podcast content. BTW, the syndication feed that I use for BlogBurst is my plain text feed. The podcast feed is an optional feed link that’s listed on my blog sidebar.
Actually, I’m more for Atom 1.0, as it is now the proposal for W3C. RSS died a long-time ago. RSS has 9 flavors with 3 or 4 versions, while Atom only has two out, and the many are switching from Atom 0.3 to Atom 1.0. I just wish Blogger do the same, they’re still Atom 0.3.
After all, we’re after the web-standards here
No one followed up on RSS or tried improving it. There’s RSS3 in development, but no one even considers it, and besides, Atom 1.0 is better now than any of the 9 flavors of RSS.
Just my thoughts.