Feeds: What is it?

In a translation from English means free food, it's almost what the technology based on XML, called feeds, it does. She feeds an aggregator of feeds.

Suppose you are a reader of several blogs, and they all need to visit several times a day every day to see if the new texts published author. Depending on the number of blogs that you came, it can be a tiring task well and possibly will make you leave to accompany some of these blogs.

Now you understand the point about the technology of feeds that lets you receive and read all the updates of their favorite blogs in one place called aggregator feeds!

An aggregator of feeds is a service where you register the addresses of feeds of blogs that you would like to follow. Generally, this address is accessed through a symbol that has become standard for this service. It is for him you will receive all texts published in all blogs automatically, without having to visit each one. The best and most popular feed aggregators are Google Reader, the Netvibes, Newsgator and My Yahoo!.

Using in your blog:

The technology facilitates the feeds and speeds up access to information that you consider important. And you can let your readers Likewise use this tool to read your blog with much more convenience and simplicity. So let's see how.

The blogs that run under the platform Wordpress already have a standard feed under the link / rss, for example: http://www.nomedoblog.com.br / rss. But this is a very simple tool, which does not offer many features of return, such as statistics on the subscribers of its feeds.

The best service to manage the feeds of your blog is FeedBurner. He offers statistics, managing feeds via e-mail, publication and dissemination of tools, from a universe of applications to make your life easier.

The FeedBurner has most of its resources available for free, and you can click here to create an account on the service. Then fill in all fields.

• Username: Your username to access the service;
• Password: Your password to access the service;
• Password (again): The repetition of the password of the previous field;
• E-mail Address: Your e-mail address;
• Secret Question: A secret question that only you know the answer;
• Secret Answer: The answer of the question used in the previous field;

You can also sign the paid version of the service, which provides even more resources.

Well, account created in FeddBurner? Now let's create your feed:

Visit the FeedBurner, click Languages at the top and replace the language to "Portuguese". Now click "Login" located in the same top of the screen.

Locate on the screen, the form for the burning of its feeds, as shown in the image below:

Enter the address of your blog (http://www.seublog.com.br) and click "Next>>".

On the next screen, click "Next>>" again.

The next step you set the title of your feed and address the same. The FeedBurner should suggest these fields, but you can change them if you prefer. Fill in the name of his blog in the "Feed Title" and the URL you want to "Feed Address" without accents or spaces. Now click on "Enable FEED."

A message will appear on the screen (in English) parabenizando him the choice of FeedBurner and showing what is the address of your feed, for example: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ titulodoseufeed.

Follow moving in "Next". Okay, your feed is ready to be signed by its readers in an aggregator of feeds. Now it is only disclose and provide a link to this address in your blog.

The resources of FeedBurner for the optimization of their feed are different. Let's meet some of them by clicking on the tab "Optmize."

In the side column, under "Services", are listed the tools available, which are:

Browser Friendly: Let's easy for potential subscribers viewing your feed or text podcast. Apply a clean layout and a visual for eyes in your XML feed to make it better seen and read in browsers Mozilla 1.x, Firefox 1.x, Camino 1.0, Internet Explorer 5.5/6.x, Opera 9 and Safari 1.3.

SmartCast: Put podcast easily into feeds that normally do not support this. Linke into MP3 files, videos, pictures and other digital media on your site and SmartCast creates links to them automatically. Optionally, add elements required for a listing richest and most detailed in the iTunes podcast directory, and Web sites that use the Yahoo Media RSS.

SmartFeed: Reach the widest audience possible only publishing a feed in your blog or website. Translate your feed instantly in a format (RSS or ATOM) compatible with the reader of your reader.

FeedFlare: Offer to their subscribers a simple way to send email, create tags, share or manipulate the content that you publish, including those listed below the services you want. FeedFlare puts a footer on each item of content, helping you to distribute, inform and create a community around their content.

Splice Link: Share also their collection of links on your feed. Mix your feed with links to some popular services, collection of links listed here. This service adds a new item I FeedBurner feed that contains your new links that you added to your collection of links. The frequency with which the links are included in your feed depends on how you make the setting for this service.

Photo Splice: Mix two visions of your online world! Mix the feed of your blog with that of your photos. Pictures of your account Flickr, Buzznet, or Webshots may be mixed in the latest entries from your original feed.

Geotag Your Feed: Let everyone know of any place on earth you publish, adding to its latitude and longitute (or ZIP code, if you live in the United States) to their feed. This service inserts the tags of latitude and longitude according to the RDF specification of the world geodesic survey. "

Feed Burner Image: Add some color to your feed. Put a picture special in your feed so that it would highlight the other when presented in several of the most popular RSS readers. This service adds a block with the tag <image> to your feed, which refers to the Internet address of the image you choose. Most RSS readers to show this image in visions of individual or grouped content items in a feed. If you prefer to send his own image, it is recommended that it has at most 144 pixels in height and width.

Title / Description Burner: You have a feed whose title or description does not satisfy you? Or its publishing tool does not allow you to modify this data? ) Title / Description Burner is their way out of these problems. He changes the title and description of your feed for what you want.

Amazon ID Burner: If you have an ID to associate at Amazon.com, this service properly insert your ID to any link to the catalog of items that Amazon.com is found in its content.

Convert Format: Nine types of RSS and now two formats of Atom ... who has time to track all this? The FeedBurner has! This service converts your feed for any of these formats.

Content Type: Initially, the attribute content-type (also called MIME type) to your feed FeedBurner is the same as your original feed. You can use this service to change the content type of your feed to something more appropriate among the options available on this service. But if you are not sure you need this service, you better let him off.

Banner Summary: Sometimes you just want to provoke. Offer a small summary of its contents without direct links and their subscribers to his site to read the rest of the article. You can also add a small message "decoys" for each piece of content.

Tickerize: You publish a feed or podcast about finances? Then you must Tickerizar him! Any sign of actions that you refer to your content in parenthesis as (GE) or (YHOO) received special elements that certain financial aggregators use to index your feed.

Resources for publication:

Thus facilitating the optimization of its feed, the FeedBurner provides several tools for you to publish and disseminate your feed. Meet them:

Headline Animator: Create animated GIFs that show the latest items from your feed. They are as rotating banners to promote your content!

BuzzBoost: This service republic your feed as HTML content that goes anywhere. Want to advertise your blog on another site that you manage? BuzzBoost gives you a JavaScript code that you can paste into your templates.

Email Subscriber: Give your readers another way to keep updated with your blog or podcast providing a signature by mail on your site. Whenever you update your content they receive in the email registered. Simple, fast and easy.

PingShot: Most web services Feed-reading will check for updates on their own time. Give them a push with the PingShot. Choose what services you want to weep and we will notify you when you publish a new content.

FeedCount: FeedCount is another legal tool to provide your feed. It is a dynamic graphic that always shows the movement of your feed, according to the calculations of FeedBurner. Choose a color scheme and static or dynamic appearance. It is you who customize!

Gum Chooser: Promote your feed FeeBurner directly on your site or blog! Place the HTML that Chicklet Chooser automatically generates for you in the template of your site to ajduar their readers to subscribe to their feed.

Awareness API: The Awareness API lets developers build applications that can display, analyze and promote traffic data from your feed off the FeeBurner. Access Awareness of the API for your feed is disabled initially, but you can change this. (Want to build applications using the Awareness API? The full documentation is available)

Creative Commons: Creative Commons is a nonprofit organization that offers multiple licenses for their content. With a Creative Commons license you can protect intellectual property but allow people to copy and distribute your work provided they aventón the credits you - and only under the conditions that you set here. This service attached to the appropriate Creative Commons license for its XML feed.

Password Protector: Basic Security to keep unwanted visitors out of your feed. Protect your content with a request for a login and password using HTTP authentication. Any request to require that your feed from your readers with a username and password to view its contents. This service only supports a combination of login and password and their subscribers to use a reader or aggregator that supports authentication to be able to see your feed. Protects but difficult to use.

Noting the results:

The subscribers via feeds of your blog are important to you even know how many people are getting their content and is a great information to be given the time to sell advertising space on their pages.

Tab 'Review', you have access to various information and statistics about your feeds. By clicking "See more about their subscribers'", you see, besides the number of subscribers, which used aggregators, who receive the articles via e-mail, the browsers used the robots that walk and checking your feed.

Making money from your feeds:

Many publishers and bloggers did not like the distribution of texts via their feeds, because you do not see ads on your blog, so do not click and blogger not billed. Fortunately, one of the first things that Google did when they took FeedBurner, it was possible the publication of ads on Google Adsense feeds. To learn more this tool, just click on the tab "monetize".

Now that you know better this tool, explore and provide it to their readers, increasing the audience and the loyalty of its audience.

See also:

• Your site or blog with mobile version
• Attract customers with a blog of your business
• 10 care to change the theme of your blog
• Installing Wordpress in Brazilian Portuguese
• Statistics for your blog