Domain Hosting Sale: Feedburner

Showing posts with label Feedburner. Show all posts

Saturday, 26 April 2014

Adding an RSS feed icon to your blog, using Feedburner

Feedburner's chicklets are used to add the standard "orange radar" button to your blog. This lets readers to subscribe the RSS feed of your choice. The information is targeted to Blogger users, but most of it applies to anyone who uses Feedburner.

What is a Chicklet, and why you need one:

Previously I've explained how to remove the (ugly and confusing) "Subscribe to Posts (atom)" link from your blog, and why RSS / Subscribe to Posts is important to your blog and how to create a Feedburner feed for it.

But an RSS feed is useless unless people subscribe to it. So as well as making the feed, you also need to put something in your blog that lets your readers sign up for it.

A standard option for this is the orange square with "radar" markings on it, which many people call a "chicklet" (since it lets your viewer - the chicken? - have access to the feed you are providing).

Feedburner also has options for:

Using a custom icon from popular web aggregators
I'm not sure that this is a great idea, because you don't know what feed-reader software your readers actually use, and the whole point of a feed is that you don't dictate how people see your blog.

Using an icon that promotes Feedburner. This cute, but I've never seen anyone use it.

How to add a chicklet to your blog:

Log in to Feedburner, using the Google account that owns the feed.

Click on the name of the feed you want to provide a subscription tool for.

Choose the Publicize tab.

Choose the Chicklet Chooser option, from the left navigation bar.

Choose one of the options shown: the default one is the standard-size RSS-radar-button.

Scroll to the bottom of the screen and either

Copy the HTML that is shown, and add it to your blog in the same way that you would add any other 3rd party HTML,

OR (note: there have been some reports that the option below doesn't work any longer, as Blogger has changed but tools like Feedburner have not help up)

Choose Blogger from the drop down list beside "use as a widget in", and click Go.

This takes you to a Blogger screen where you can choose which blog you want to add the gadget to (if your current login has more than one), and what title to use for it.

When this is done, click Add Widget.

This takes you to the Design > Layout tab, where you can drag-and-drop the widget to wherever you want it.
(When I tried it just now, instead of the layout screen I got a "bad request" message. However pressing Save and then View Blog brought up the blog with the gadget showing, and I was able to go back and edit the layout later on).

What your readers see:

Your readers will see an item, wherever you put it, that looks like this:

Subscribe in a reader

or

or something similar, depending on what option you chose from the Chicklet Chooser screen.

When someone clicks on one of these items, they are taken to either a screen where they choose which feed-reader software to add your site to (if you've used the first option), or to the specific feed-reader software.

Customising the widget code:

If you use the generic RSS button, then you may want to customise the widget code slightly: It looks ugly not to have a space between the picture and the word "Subscribe" - and it's good to have the phrase "RSS" on the screen because that'ss what RSS-savvy people search for when they're looking at a website and want to find the subscribe option. I also prefer if the subscribe action opens in a new tab/window, rather than taking the reader away from my blog.

This is quite easy to do, if you put a few line breaks in so you can see that

the code is actually two separate link statements
the first one has an image (the orange "radar bars" that it takes from Feedburner)
the second is a text link
both of them link to the RSS feed address

So it's quite easy to add a couple of extra spaces (shown as   ), change the text as I've done below, and add target="_blank" to both of the links

<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/Blogger-hints-and-tips" rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" target="_blank">
<img src="http://www.feedburner.com/fb/images/pub/feed-icon32x32.png" alt="" style="vertical-align:middle;border:0"/>
</a>

     

<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/Blogger-hints-and-tips" rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" target="_blank">

Subscribe via RSS

</a>

I generally also put the option to subscribe to my blog by email and the Feedburner FeedCount item (which shows the number of subscribers) in the same area, to give people options, and to encourage them to subscribe.

Using Feedburner to give your blog a Subscribe by Email option

Adding 3rd party HTML to your blog

Why RSS / Subscribe to Posts is important to your blog

How to create a Feedburner feed for your blog

Thursday, 10 October 2013

The "follow by email" gadget: an easy way to add an email subscription to your blog

Blogger have made it very simple to offer an email-subscription to your blog, with the "Follow by Email" gadget. This article describes adding it to your blog, and how it works for your readers.

Previously, I've explained why RSS is important for your blog, and how to give your blog a subscribe by email option using Feedburner.

The Follow by Email gadget that Blogger provide makes this even easier: you can add an email subscription option to your blog by following these steps:

How to add the Follow by Email Gadget

Log in to Blogger
Use a Google account with admin rights to the blog, and which you want to use to get statistics about your email subscribers.
Go to the Design tab
Select Add a Gadget in the area where you want to put the email subscription option
Choose Follow by Email (it's current at the top of the list)
Enter the title that you want displayed on your blog (initially it's "Follow by email")
Press Save.

This puts the gadget onto your blog. But there are two more things that you should do:

Check that your blog's RSS feed is enabled: it should be either "Full" or "Until Jump Break", not "None". You need to do this because the Follow-by-email tool will only send out emails if your feed is turned on.

Subscribe to it yourself- by entering your own email.
This isn't absolutely essential - the tool works even if you're not signed up to it. But it's a good idea to try to see your blog from the reader's perspective.
And some items in your posts (eg slideshows or PowerPoint presentations) may not work as expected in the emailed version - and you won't know about it unless you're getting the emails.

What your readers see:

On Your Blog:

The Follow by Email gadget looks like this:

The title was set when you were adding the gadget: you can change it by editing the gadget in the usual way.

The background colour, button colour, title underline and font are based on the settings for your template: you can only control them by editing the gadget colours in your template.

You cannot put text immediately before our after the place where people can enter an email address: though you could put a text-gadget before or after the Follow-by-email gadget.

When they enter an email address:

When your visitor enters an email address and presses Submit, a new window opens:

This window:

Welcomes them to Feedburner
Acknowledges their Google account, if they are logged in at the time - remember, not all your visitors will be Google users
Tells them about the feed that they are asking to subscribe to
Warns them that a confirmation message will be sent to the email address they entered
"will receive a verification message once you submit this form" and that "FeedBurner activates your subscription to ... once you respond to this verification message"
Asks them to solve a text-catpcha puzzle, to prove it's a real person (not a computer) setting up the subscription.

The colours, design and content of this window are totally controlled by Feedburner. You can't influence them in any way.

After the anti-spam-test is successfully completed, a second screen opens. This tells the reader that

Your request has been accepted! Please check your inbox for a verification message from “FeedBurner Email Subscriptions”, the service that delivers email subscriptions for <<your-blog-name>>. You will need to click a link listed in this message to activate your subscription. If you dont see a confirmation e-mail in a reasonable amount of time please check your bulk/spam folder.

Again, you have no control over the color, format or placement of this window, it is totally up to Feedburner. You also don't control the message text, which many people are likely to ignore.

In their email in-box, today:

Your potential subscriber gets an email from Feedburner, usually within 2-10 minutes, asking them to click a link to complete the subscription process.

If they click the link, they become a verified subscriber.

If they don't click the link, then they stay on the subscribers list as unverified.

You can customize the "click the link to subscribe" message, using some fairly simply settings in Feedburner.

In their email in-box, when you post:

On days when you have posted to your blog, every verified subscriber is sent one email message, with all your posts during the day.

The message may include the full post or just a summary, depending on what settings you have for your blog's RSS feed (Settings > Site Feed > Blog Posts feed).

Feedburner provides a number of options for controling how this email looks, and when it is sent: see the Publicize > Email Subscriptions > Email branding tab in Feedburner for these. (full article coming soon).

More information about the gadget:

This new gadget has been widely requested, and is an exciting addition to Blogger. But there are some challenges with it, which are discussed in Understanding the Follow-by-Email gadget.

What happens if you delete the widget

Even if the follow-by-email gadget is deleted from your blog (by accident or deliberately), the Feedburner subscription that it created, and the list of people who have subscribed, is still kept in Feedburner.

However to add the gadget to your blog again, you need to use Feedburner's gadget tool to make sure that you access the feed that you created when you added the gadget the first time around.

(Thanks to reader +Mary Bostow whose question got me thinking about this.)

Why RSS is important for your blog,

An alternative to "Follow-by-email": giving your blog a subscribe by email option using Feedburner.

Customizing Feedburners verification message

Putting a Picasa slideshow into a blog-post

Showing a PowerPoint presentation in your blog, as a slideshow

Thursday, 26 May 2011

Feedflare lets you add social tools to your RSS feed

This article is about using Feedburner's tools for adding interactive features and social networking links to your RSS feed items.

What is FeedFlare useful for?

Many bloggers spend a lot of time making social sharing features available on-screen in their blog - using things like Facebook's share button, follow-me on Twitter, etc.

But all this effort is lost on people who view your blog via an RSS feedreader. All they see is the content that's sent through your feed: they don't see any gadgets at all, unless they click-through to look at your blog.

If your feed is being managed with Feedburner, then the FeedFlare tools let you add social networking and interactive links to each post that you send out in your feed. Unlike your blog, you can't control where they're put or how they look. But many people believe that having them in a limited form is a lot better than not having them at all.

Currently the tools that can be added using FeedFlare include

Email the author
Post to Facebook
Post to Digg This
Save to del.ic.ious
Discuss on Newsvine
Stumble! it
Add to Mixx!

Note that Twitter isn't currently included.

Turning on the FeedFlare for your feed:

Log in to Feedburner, using the Google account that owns the feed

Click on the name of the feed you want to work with.

Choose the Optimize tab

Click on FeedFlare in the left hand navigation bar.

This opens a list of the options that can currently be turned on using the FeedFlare function - as show in the picture below.
Note: this list has expanded during recent months, it's worth checking back occasionally to see if something you would find useful has been added.

Tick the items that you want to use in the column headed "Feed". Each thing that you tick will show up at the bottom of each feed item when it's viewed in an RSS reader.
Many (or even all) item-names can be clicked on to show a more detailed explanation of what the item is about. eg clicking on "Comments Count (Blogger" reveals the explanation "Lists the number of comments posted to an item. This FeedFlare works with Blogger-based feeds only."

The Personal Feed Flare section lets you add more Flare items, either by choosing from Feedburner's catalogue or by building your own using Feedburner's API.
I'm not doing to discuss these options here, except to note that

Potentially this tool can be used to add your custom items (eg an eBook that you have written) to your feed, so they're available to subscribers. (I may devote a future article to this)

Many of the items in Feedburner's catalog but not on their main list were developed by 3rd party developers - as with other widgets and templates, I'm very reluctant to recommend using them, because of the lack of assurance that they do exactly - and only - what they claim to.

When you are happy with the options selected, click Activate to start the service - or click Save if you have adjusted the flare options.

You will know that the change has been made because the word Feedflare (in the left navigation bar) has a small tick beside it.   Check for this - it's very easy to miss the Activate button because it's at the bottom of the screen and you have to scroll to get to it.

Job Done!

Note: There is also a column headed Site.   This lets you generate code to put the items ticked into your website, and t he "on Site" section at the bottom of the screen gives you the HTML code to put FeedFlare for the ticked items onto your site, and has (slightly out-of-date) instructions for how to install the code into Blogger.    I'm not recommending this, because there are now plenty of articles about how to put better-looking and more functional items into your blog.

What your readers see:

How your reader see posts when they view them with a feed reader depends on their own browser settings (as always), and also on specific the feed reader software they're using (Google Reader, Bloglines, etc).

The picture below shows the bottom of my Blogger-Hints-and-Tips feed, when viewed in Google reader.   The items selected in FeedFlare are shown as bullet-ed items. Underneath that, Google Reader also has some other links too.

Thursday, 5 May 2011

Getting started with Feedburner

This article is about how to set up Feedburner to produce a feed from a blog. It is targetted at Blogger users, but most of the information applies to other types of blogs and webpages too.

Overview

Previously I've explained why an RSS feed is important to bloggers,

Feedburner is one option for addressing the limitations of Blogger's "native" feeds.

And although it's owned by Google now, it was originally a different company so isn't quite the same as good to set up.

That said, getting started with Feedburner is actually very simple. You just:

"burn" (ie create) a feed from your blog (or other website),
put something in your website that lets your visitors choose to subscribe to your feed.

This article is about the first step, creating the feed.

Burning a Feed in Feedburner

Follow these steps:

1 Go to Feedburner: http://www.feedburner.com/

2 Log in, using the same Google account that owns your blog.

Feedburner doesn't enforce this: you can burn feeds for websites, blogs etc that you don't own. But if you are interested in managing the rights of your blog overall, and in particular if you may want to give it to someone else to manage, it's very helpful if the same account owns all the components in your blog.

NOTE: if you have added the Follow-by-email gadget to your blog, then you will already have created a feedburner "feed" for it. You can find out if there is one by looking on the screen that's shown when you log in to Feedburner. If you do have a feed then you may want to continue using it, rather than set up a new one.

3 Enter your blog's URL in the "Burn a feed right this instant" field

4 Press Next

5 Choose a feed source:

Because Blogger's current standard is to provide two feeds for each blog (one in Atom format, one in RSS format), Feedburner will show you a message saying "Feedburner discovered more than one feed at that address", and asking you which one you want to use.

Currently, I don't know any advantages of using either one, so I generally leave it on the default (ie first) option.

6 On the next screen, you can change the suggested values for the the feed's title and part of it's URL.

The title is the name that the feed will be known as in your Feedburner account.
It's possible to burn more than one feed from the same blog, if you want different features on different feeds. If you're going to do this, make sure you use names that are meaningful to you.
The URL is the one that feed-subscribers need to enter into their feed-reader-software to subscribe to your feed: this isn't normally seen by human-beings so doesn't need to be meaningful - Feedburner generally makes it a "tiny-URL" style of abbreviation.

7 Feedburner then creates your new feed, and shows you a congratulations message.

This message includes the name of the feed. Theoretically you could share this with your audience, but I've noticed that sometimes it has extra spaces it in. It's far better to wait and use the tools from the Publicize tab to share your feed with your viewers.

8 You are given the option of adding some extra free statistics: I generally turn these on because they're free and I haven't found any reason not to have them.

(You could turn them off if you viewers complain that your feed is slow to work with, but it doesn't usually seem to happen.)

Next steps

Just creating a feed from Feedburner isn't actually very useful - your blog was already publishing feeds anyway. The benefits come from using Feedburners tools to promote, manage and monitor use of your feed. You can access these from the main Feedburner screen, which is where you are taken after your feed is made. The options are grouped into the Optimize, Publicize, Moneytize and Troubleshootize tabs.

Feedburner sometimes shows some "cute" phrases on the screen, and uses quirky words to describe things, eg "troubleshootize". This is because the product was originally totally separate from Google and the company developed its own way of doing things. When Google took over, some things become more standard, but this wasn't one of them.

There are lots of things you can do with your feed. But the first and most important steps are:

Components in your blog

Why an RSS feed is important to bloggers

The Follow-by-email gadget: an easy way to make a feed from your blog

Making your Feedburner feed available on your blog

Making an email-subscription available on your blog

Providing social proof, by enabling the Feedcount button

Understanding Google accounts

Tools for applying copyright protection to your blog

Putting a Facebook "Share this" badge on your blog.

Tuesday, 3 May 2011

Understanding the Follow-by-Email gadget and Feedburner

The Follow-by-email gadget is built on top of Feedburner's email-subscription service. It's very easy to add to your blog, but there are some things that you need to think about if you are using it to deliver posts to your followers by email.

Adding the "Follow by Email" gadget

The Follow-by-Email gadget is a very simple way to give your readers access to blog-updates by email: it delivers a message in their inbox every day that you post.

But to decide if it's a good thing to use, to get good value from it, and to troubleshoot any problems, you need to understand a little more about how it works.

And, since it uses Feedburner, this means understanding how Feedburner works.

What is Feedburner:

The Follow by Email gadget uses a product called Feedburner to manage the list of subscribers.
This started as a tool to enhance the RSS subscribtions that website-owners delivered - see Why RSS / Subscribe to Posts is important for your blog for info about RSS. Very roughly speaking, every time a website publishes a new item, Feedburner adds that item to a "feed" or summary of the site, and tells all the subscribers about it, without the subscribers having to visit the website.

One option that Feedburner added was subscribe-by-email: website owners who use Feedburner for this have to turn the service on, and then put "something" on their website that offers the service to people who want to get emailed updates. To start with, Feedburner just kept a list of emails addresses, but now it's more sophisticated and checking with addresses that they really do want to be subscribed before adding them to the list, and offers un-subscribe option with each subscription email.

Adding the follow-by-email option to your blog sets this up for you: it sets up a feed, turns the email service "on", and puts an email-capturing box onto your blog.

What is set up when you add the gadget:

You put the Follow-by-email gadget onto your blog the same way you would add any other gadget.

This means that, you are logged in to a Google account at the time.

If that Google account already owns an entry (ie a "feed") in Feedburner for the blog you're adding the gadget to, then the gadget just uses this feed.

But if the Google account doesn't currently have an entry from the blog, then a new feed is created, and the email service is turned on for it.:

The Feed Title is based on the blog's name.
The feed address appears to be fairly random (eg I created one for a blog called "Another test blog", and the feed name is http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/meaUW

Advantages of the Follow-by-email gadget:

This gadget makes it a lot easier to offer a follow-by-email option: you don't have to set up the feed yourself, or use a HTML-gadget to provide a subscribe-by-email form.

And because it uses Feedburner, you have full access to Feedburner's statistics, and a number of other things that are included in Feedburner's features, including:

Customizing the "click the link to subscribe" message,
Getting a list of all your email subscribers (verified and unverified), and
Configuring the look-and-feel (including timing and from-address) of the daily email to your follow-by-emailers.

Disadvantages of the Follow-by-email gadget:

There are some disadvantages of both the gadget, and the approach that Blogger has used to implement it:

Google / Blogger have mixed up the words "subscribers" and "followers". It used to be that subscribers used RSS gadgets (from Feedburner or other feed-providers), and followers used Blogger's own following-tools. But this new gadget is called "follow-by-email", and it's possible that mixing up the ideas will make some people very confused.

Using the gadget, you have very little control over the look and feel of the follow-by-email option on your blog.

Compare this to the "Get updates by email" option which is in the top of the sidebar on this blog: I've put a lot of effort into getting the wording "just right" so potential subscribers know that they will be getting a please-confirm email. This on-screen wording means that even if they don't act on the email immediately, they get another reminder about if they come back to the blog again in the future.
You have no control over the message that potential follow-by-emailers are shown to tell them to verify their subscription. It looks like this

While this message is fine for the tech-minded people who are likely subscribe to an RSS feed, it will probably bring a glazed look to those of your visitors who need a very simple subscribe-by-email option!

People who follow your blog by email will not be included in your Followers gadget or count - though you can use the Feedcount button to show how many subscribers your blog has.

People who subscribe to your blog by email don't see any of the widgets on your blog, or any advertisements. (Unlike regular RSS-feed subscribers for whom you can set up AdSense for feeds). Despite the options mentioned above, ou have very little control over how they see your messages, especially if they happen to be using email software that shows your messages in plain text.

Customising Feedburner's email subscription messages

You can control the email-messages that Feedburner sends to people who have signed up for your blog's "subscribe by email" option.

Overview

Previously I've described how to make a Feedburner feed and how to add the subscribe by email option to your blog.

If you have added a subscribe-by-email feature, and a reader (who's not already subscribed to the email feed) enters their email address, then Feedburner will show a catpcha-text screen (to check that you're not a computer, maliciously submitting other people's addresses), and sent an email to the address, asking the recipient to confirm that they really do want to subscribe to your blog.

The 2nd email stops other people from signing you up as a subscriber to blogs that you're not interested in.

But it means that some people who are interested in subscribing to your feed don't actually complete the process, because they don't understand what's going on, or miss the email (eg it goes to their spam folder).

You can deal with this by

Telling new subscribers that they are going to get an email, and what to do with it
(see the "subscribe by email" option on this site for one way to do this), AND

Configuring the details of the email that is sent: sender-address and message-text are both important for maintaining your blog's image, and ensuring that people click the link and complete their subscription.

The rest of this article is about the configuration options that are available.

Customising the subscription-link email message:

Log in to Feedburner, using the Google account that owns the feed you want to customise (remember, may not be the same Google account that owns the blog, especially if you are using AdSense to monetize your feed.)

Choose the Publicize tab

Choose Email Subscriptions from the menu on the left.

Choose the Communication Preferences option. This opens options in the main window where you can edit:

The sender-address

The default value is the email address associated with the Google account that owns the feed. But you can change it to any valid email address (and I suspect an invalid one too, if you like - I haven't tested this).

It may be tricky to choose what email address to use: the same one is used for both the subscription-activation email and for every other post-notification email that is sent by your feed. An address that looks like a real person (eg mary@gmail.com) is less likely to end up in your potential subscribers junk folder. But you may not want your personal email address to appear to your email-subscribers every time you post, especially if the blog is written by a team or belongs to a club or business.

If you change the sender-address sometime after your email-feed is set up, then some of your subscribers may stop getting messages because they only have the previous address, not the new one, on their friends list (whitelist). If you're going to do this, be certain that the benefit of changing is worth losing a few subscribers over.

The text for the confirmation email.

Google (or perhaps Feedburners original owners) have provided some standard text, which is used unless you change it.

The tone of this is very informal, eg starting with"hello there" and (IMHO) irritating "we can't wait to send you updates". You may want to change it to match the style and tone of your blog.

Press Save in the bottom left corner of the screen to save your changes.

Important: Don't forget to press Save. Currently you are not warned that changes will be lost if you navigate away (even just to the email branding sub-option) - but they are.

fyi, the Email Branding and Delivery Options links lead to other controls, which control the email messages that Feedburner sends when you send an items to your blog's feed. They will be discussed in another article, because they're too complicated to go into here.

Related Articles:

Understanding your Google account

Getting a list of your Feedburner email subscribers

How to make feed using Feedburner

Using the Feedcount widget to encourage new subscribers with social proof

Putting email-links into your blog

Tuesday, 26 April 2011

Giving your subscribers a free file (eg an eBook) using Feedburner

This article shows how to make an eBook (or any file) available to your blog's subscribers with Feedburner's FeedFlare tool. It's written for Blogger users, but most of the information applies to anyone using Feedburner.

Feedflare, a no-maintenance tool for giving away files on your blog

A give-away is one approach to get readers more more connected with your blog: if you give people something of value, they'll feel warmer and fuzzier towards you, and read your blog more often (so the thinking goes).

No matter what you are giving away, you need a way of getting it to your readers. This can be more time-consuming than you think, especially if it's an on-going gift for lots of people, not just a one-off gift for one lucky reader.

But if you give away a file, then you just need a computer to do the work for you: you can put a link on your blog either in a post (like this) or as a gadget (eg linked to from a Picture, or as an entry in a Linked-list gadget).

However you might want to get a bit more cunning, and only make the gift available to people who actually subscribe to your blog, because people who have subscribed are more likely to come back again. This doesn't guarantee an on-going connection - some folks will subscribe, get the goodies and immediately un-subscribe. But probably some will become long-term readers.

Feedburner's FeedFlare tool makes it easy to distribute a file to subscribers, using your feed, by:

Putting the eBook (or whatever file) somewhere
Making a FeedFlare script to show the book, and putting somewhere that it can be read (it's just a text file)
Telling your Feed to use the script
Telling (potential) subscribers how to access the eBook from your feed.

1 Put the file somewhere:

Load the file that you want to distribute to any file-host.

If the file-host that you use provides security (99.9% of them do), make sure that the access options are set to either "everyone" or "anyone with the link".

Make a note of the URL of the file on this system.

Sign out of your file-hosting account and test that you can access the file even though you're logged out.
(Testing it at this stage means that you don't have to worry about it later.)

There are lots of places where you can host files (hosting simply means storing them, usually with some rules about who is allowed to read and edit them.

I tend to use Google tools because there are less likely to be compatibility problems, so I've been using either Google Docs, or a file cabinet page on a Google Sites site.

2 Make a FeedFlare script:

Use Notepad (or any other text-editor) to make a text file containing the following:

<FeedFlareUnit>
        <Catalog>
            <Title>THE TITLE TO SHOW *YOU* IN FEEDBURNER </Title>
            <Description>Download the eBook</Description>
        </Catalog>
        <FeedFlare>
            <Text>THE NAME THAT YOU WANT SUBSCRIBERS TO SEE</Text>
        <Link href="http://URL OF THE FILE YOU ARE GIVING AWAY"/>
        </FeedFlare>
    </FeedFlareUnit>

Customize the text (the bits shown in bold) to the correct values for your file.

This file is your FeedFlare script. Save it to your computer as YOUR-FILE-NAME.xml
Note that it needs to be .xml, not .txt.

Upload the script file to a file host (see the section before for options) from where it can be read as a text file.

Note: In the past, I've found that Google Docs doesn't work for this, because when something tries to read the file it's "served" with a Docs header. I don't know if it's still the case, but I generally use a filing-cabinet page in Googe Sites to store text files, just in case.

Set the access options for this file to are set to either "everyone" or "anyone with the link".

Make a note of the URL of the script-file.

Sign out of your file-hosting account and test that you can access the file even though you're logged out.
(Testing it at this stage means that you don't have to worry about it later.)

3 Tell your Feed to use the script:

Log in to Feedburner account, with the account that owns your blog's feed.

Click on your Feed, to see the details about it.

Go to the Optimize tab.

Click on Feedflare (currently in menu on the left hand side, under Services)
The Official FeedFlare section gives you a number of options for adding social networking tools to your feeds.
In the Personal FeedFlare section, enter the URL of the XML file with your script (ie the one you uploaded in section 2)

Click Activate (if you haven't been using Feedflare before) or Save (if you have)

What your subscribers will see

Once you have done this, future posts that go out in your feed (both emailed feeds and via feed-reader software) will have an icon at the bottom, labelled with the value you put in for "THE NAME THAT YOU WANT SUBSCRIBERS TO SEE".

When a subscriber clicks on this link, your eBook (or whatever the fileis ) will download to their computer, and may open depending on their settings for downloaded files. In Google Reader, it looks like this - you may want to test it in a few feed-reader tools, depending on what your readers use.

Troubleshooting:

If the URL of your feedflare file, or your eBook file, starts with HTTPS:// , then take the "S" out, so it becomes http://...

If you already had Feedflare activated and are just adding a script, you may get an error message when you click Save. Try changing one of the Official Feedflare settings at the same time as you add the script name.

Note that the link to the file is not included in items that have already been sent out in your blog's feed, only in new feed items that are generated after the script is added.

Tell your readers and subscribers how to access the file:

Making the eBook available through your feed is only the first step in getting value from it. You also need to:

By edited by Felipe Micaroni Lalli
(http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cc_.png)
[CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons

Tell your subscribers that it's there and how to access it:
These peole are already using a feed-reader or email subscription, they probably won't have difficulty clicking the link - once they know it's there. But it may be worth telling them what type of software they need to use to open the file.

Tell potential subscribers about it:
Casual readers, now and in the future, need to know that if they subscribe, they will get access to the eBook. How much detail you need to provide (eg telling them how to subscribe, explaining what subscribing means etc), depends on your blog's niche and how "subscription-savvy" your typical reader is.

You may find that some readers need a very detailed explanation. It's likely that there are some good articles about this on the net already, but I don't currently have any links - if you find one, please do leave a comment below.

Acknowledgement and further info:

This article was inspired by:

A post in ProBlogger which described how to implement a file give-away in a WordPress blog (where it is possible to upload files to the root directory, meaning that the process is a little simpler), and
A person in the Blogger Help Forum who asked how to do something similar in Blogger, at about the same time I read the Problogger article.

Many thanks to them both.

You can do more complicated things than this using FeedFlare: see the Feedflare Developer's guide for more inforation. Also, their first "Hello world" script is a useful tool if you need to diagnose if problems getting this approach to work are due to file-hosting or to the feed itself.

Adding social networking tools to your Feedburner feeds

File hosting options.

Encourage new subscribers by enabling Feedburner's FeedCount button

Adding social networking buttons to your Feed

Adding Amazon Associates product links and banners to your blog.

Sunday, 9 January 2011

Getting a list of people who have asked (via Feedburner) to have your blog-posts emailed to them

This article shows how to get a list of the people who have subscribed to receive the items in a Feedburner feed in their email. It's written for Blogger users, but applies to anyone who uses Feedburner.

Overview:

Adapted from Rei-artur, original Jak
CC-BY-SA-3.0-2.5-2.0-1.0
(http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)],
via Wikimedia Commons

Previously, I've explained how to set up a feed with Feedburner, and that for your feed to be useful you need to give people a way to subscribe to it. The options for subscribing to your feed include using RSS feed-reader software (eg Google Reader) or, if you provide the option, subscribing via email. And Google has now provided the Follow-by-email gadget which makes it even easier for you to add the email subscription option.

Some bloggers prefer people to subscribe by email, because this gives them access to the list of email addresses of their subscribers - making it possible for them to send messages to subscribers separately from posting to the blog.

Getting a list of subscribers-by-email is easy, but you do need to have software that can open a Comma Separated Values (CSV) file to see the list - Microsoft Excel is a tool that lots of people use, but there are many others.

Warning:
I have not investigated if there are any Feedburner Terms and Conditions about what you may or may not do with the list of subscribers. I expect that there are some - it's up to you to make sure that anything you do with the extracted list meets these rules.

How to see your list of email subscribers:

Log in to Feedburner, using the Google account that owns the feed.

Click on the name of the feed you are interested in: this opens the Feed Stats Dashboard in the Analyse tab.

Click on Subscribers from the menu on the left

Scroll down to the Email Subscription Services area

Click on Feedburner Email Subscriptions

Click on Manage your Email Subscriber List

Click on Export - CSV

The download starts: depending on how your machine is set up you will probably be asked what you want to do with the file (mine opens it in Excel)

Monday, 27 December 2010

Get your posts right before you publish them to your RSS feed

This article is about the relationship between your RSS feed and the Publish button, and ways of using Blogger to reduce the chances of readers seeing something that you didn't want to publish yet.

Your RSS feed and the Publish button

I've previously described why RSS is important for bloggers who care about building an audience.

But it's also important to realise that:

Some of your RSS subscribers only see the first version of each post that you publish, not the most recently edited one.

Even if you delete a post from your blog shortly after publishing it, the published version is still in your RSS feed and will be seen by people who read it.
(I've heard that some feed-aggregator / reader tools do delete items, however some eg Google Reader, don't.)

Personally, I took a long time to understand the consequences of this: When I started blogging, I Published early-and-often while I was writing each post, so I could see what it "felt" like. (The Preview button, because it shows you the "look" but not the latest content, and editing the content was important to me.) This meant that subscribers saw very early, drafty versions of my posts, so many of them decided to unsubscribe pretty quickly.

Even after I understood, I still occasionally hit Publish by accident. And my writing wasn't good, because I find it hard to proof-read properly in the post-editor.

So far I've found two ways of using Blogger that can address this problem.

Option 1: Turn the blog-feed off, except when you publish the final version

Posts are only sent out in your blog's feed if the feed is turned on. So every time you want to work on a post:

Turn the feed off (Settings > Site Feed > Allow Blog Feeds = None)
Work on your post, Publishing it as you like
Save the Post as Draft (so it's status is back to draft again)
Turn the feed on (Settings > Site Feed > Allow Blog Feeds = anything except None)

Or you could keep Allow Blog Feeds = None, turn it on every time you publish a post for the first time, and turn it off again afterwards.

This is particularly good approach if you have a lot of email subscribers via Feedburner - because that tool is currently (Dec 2010) sending out an update every time a post is published or updated, instead of just for every "new" publication (ie one that changes the post-status from Draft to Published).

However it's very manual, and there's always a risk that you might forget to turn the feed on or off at the right moment.

Option 2: Prepare posts in a separate blog

This is my preferred approach, and now there are at least three different "blogs" for each blog I that run:

The blog (what IT professionals call "production")
A documentation blog, where I keep my notes about how it's put together
A pre-publication blog, when I keep posts that are being worked on.

The blog itself is set to public (or restricted to a limited audience if that's appropriate). The others are set to:

Private (Settings > Permissions > Blog readers = Only Blog Authors)
Not listed (Settings > Basic > Add your blog to our listings = No)
Not indexed (Settings > Basic > Let search engines find your blog = No)
Not listed on my Blogger Profile (Dashboard > Edit Blogger Profile > Select blogs to display)

At various times, if I'm preparing for template changes or adding new features, I may also have test-blogs. These are always set to Private too.

When I'm preparing a post, I work on it in the "pre-production" blog, and can Publish it as many times as I like. Then when it's complete, I simply copy the post from the pre-prod blog to the real one, and publish it once.

A big benefit is that if I get an idea about a potential post, I can just go to the pre-publication blog and make a very quick note about it: the writing and research quality doesn't matter, because I'm the only person who sees it.

The one thing I need to do is to always check and re-check the blog I'm about to post in, every time I hit "Publish": the day after I first released this post was the first time in ages that I accidentally published a draft post to this blog (subscribers will have seen it come through the feel) .... very embarrassing indeed!

Have you found other ways to avoid problems like this?

I'd love to hear about what works for you.

Sunday, 5 December 2010

Encourage new subscribers by enabling Feedburner's FeedCount button

This article is about how to add the FeedCount icon, which shows viewers how many subscribers your FeedBurner feed has, and lets them subscribe themselves. The information is targeted at Blogger users, but most of it applies to anyone who uses Feedburner.

What is a FeedCount icon:

Previously I've explained how to create a Feedburner feed for your blog and how to add a Subscribe to my feed icon, and how to use Feedburner to provide an email subscription option.

Feedburner also provides another tool that you can use to let people sign up for your blog. This is the FeedCount icon, which shows the number of people who are currently subscribed to your RSS feed.

This is useful because of the "social proof" that it provides: people are more likely to sign up for something once they see that other people have also signed up.

How to add a FeedCount icon to you blog:

Log in to Feedburner, using the Google account that owns the feed.

Click on the name of the feed you want to provide a subscription tool for.

Choose the Publicize tab.

Choose the FeedCount option, from the left navigation bar.

Set the options for your button:

Static or animated (I recommend static, because things that flick unnecessarily are annoying)
Font colour for the background
Font color for the text

At the bottom of the screen, click the Activate button.

Either

Copy the HTML that is shown, and add it to your blog in the same way that you would add any other 3rd party HTML,

Choose Blogger from the drop down list beside "use as a widget in", and click Go.

This takes you to a Blogger screen where you can choose which blog you want to add the gadget to (if your current login has more than one), and what title to use for it.

When this is done, click Add Widget.

This takes you to the Design > Layout tab, where you can drag-and-drop the widget to wherever you want it.

Note: if you want to re-generate the button at a later time with different colour or style options, just choose the options and click Save (which is at the bottom of the screen where Activate was originally).

What your readers see:

Your readers will see an item, wherever you put it, that looks like this:

It shows a count of the current number of subscribers to your Feedburner feed.

When someone clicks on it, they are taken to a screen where they choose which feed-reader software they want to use to subscribe to your site.

How to create a Feedburner feed for your blog

Using Feedburner to give your blog a Subscribe by Email option

Adding 3rd party HTML to your blog

Why RSS / Subscribe to Posts is important to your blog

Displaying a gadget only on the home page

FeedFlare lets you add social tools to your Feedburner feeds

Tuesday, 30 November 2010

Send posts to Twitter with Feedburner's socialize service

This article is about using Feedburner's Socialize feature to ensure that all your blog posts are sent to Twitter.

Overview:

Once you have made a feed for your blog using Feedburner, you can use Feedburner's Socialise option to automatically send new Posts to Twitter.

Advantages of using this service include:

Hashtags can be automatically generated based on the Labels you have applied to your post: Feedburner is a Google product, so it understands and can access all the data-structures that Blogger uses to organise your posts.
You can control various other options, including excluding some categories of post from your twitter-feed
You can add some standard text to either the beginning or end of each twitter-message
If you display a counter of the number of times a post has been tweeted, then each post will automatically have at least one tweet.
It saves you time, because you don't have to manually tweet your posts.

A word about Accounts:

Using this feature can involve up to three different accounts:

The Google account that writes the post (may be an author or an administrator - of if you're using mail2Post, it could be neither)
The Google account that owns the feed (because you can burn a feed of a blog-site that you don't own)
The Twitter account that tweets the message about the blog post.

Think carefully about what Twitter account to use: if your blog is personal, then your personal Twitter account is obvious. In other cases, it depends on your niche, and the relationship between the blog and the rest of your life. If the blog isn't tied to your individual identity, or you don't want to bother most of your personal friends with it, then it may be best to set up a spearate account for it, like I have for @BloggerHAT.

As a general rule, if Facebook's rules say that you need to set up a Page rather than a Profile for what you are writing about, then you should probably have a separate Twitter account for it..

Currently the Socialise service only allows sending a feed to one Twitter account. It looks like you should be able to change the Twitter account by clicking Add a Twitter account, and having the new Twitter account replace the current one. but currently this is failing. This means that there is no way to remove a twitter account from your Feedburner / Socialise set-up. If you need to stop the auto-tweets, deactivate the service, or perhaps just delete the whole feed or Twitter account.

How to set up auto-tweeting:

Log in to Feedburner, using the Google account that owns the feed

Click on the name of the feed you want to work with.

Choose the Publicize tab

Choose Socialise (currently from the left side of the screen)

Click Add a Twitter account,.

This opens a official Twitter screen where you enter the name and password of the Twitter account that you want to use for tweeting your posts.
(If you are already logged in to Twitter, it defaults to the current account, but there is a Sign-out option on the screen that lets you change accounts.)

Clicking Allow gives permission for Google (ie Feedburner) to post to this account, and returns to you the Feedburner options screen.

Each twitter message can only be 140 characters long, so the service will need to automatically summarise your post. There are options for you to choose whether this is done from the title along, or from the title+content.

There are some other options too

Include a link to the post or not (I can't think of a good reason not to do this)
Use hashtags (created from Labels) or not (this depends on how Labels have been used in your blog: I have it turned on for this blog, but not for one of my other blogs where I have used Labels mainly for internal administration purposes)
Adding some standard text and the start or end of each tweet
Leaving space for re-tweets (ie making the original less than 140 characters long): I'd suggest selecting this, as a lot of the value of Twitter comes from people sharing what you have said.
A maximum number of items (meaning Posts, I think) to include in each tweet: I think this only applies if you post more than once per day, and for BloggerHAT I've set it to 1.

Check the the Sample Item Preview section at the the bottom of the page: this shows you how your recent Posts would look in twitter with the options you have selected.

When you are happy with the options selected, click Activate to start the service.

You will know that the change has been made because the word Socialise (in the left navigation bar) has a small tick beside it. Check for this - it's very easy to miss the Activate button because it's at the bottom of the screen and you have to scroll to get to it.

What your readers see:

People who read your blog through the browser or via email subscription will not notice any difference.

People who are following your Twitter account will start to see regular tweets each time that you make a new Post, or that an existing Posts is re-sent though your blog's Feed.

Twitter users who don't follow your blog, but who happen to search for either the hashtags or keywords that are in your tweets may see your message in their search results. If it's helpful, they may click on the link to your post, and hopefully will become regular readers or subscribers.

(Remember Pages do not go through the feed, so will not be tweeted.)

Post-title == twitter-message

Once your posts are being auto-tweeted, the contents of the twitter-message depends on the title of your post. So you need to really focus on the keywords in the title, to make sure that you get a sensible 140 character message sent in your twitter-stream.

Making a Feedburner feed for your blog

Adding a Tweet button to your blog

Linking your blog and the social networks

Putting a Follow Me on Twitter button into your blog

Using mail2Post to update your blog

Tools for applying copyright protection to your blog

Copying all posts from one blog to another.

Sunday, 7 November 2010

Adding a subscribe-by-email option, using Feedburner

This article is about using Feedburner to give your blog a "subscribe by email" option. It is targeted to Blogger users, but most of the information applies to any type of website.

Previously I've described how to make a Feedburner feed, and how to put a subscribe to my feed tool on to your blog, as well as explaining why it's important for your blog to offer RSS feeds in general.

An advantage of Feedburner over some feed-management tools is that it includes an email subscription option for people who don't actually want to use feed-reader software but do want to be told about changes to your site.

Services provided by Feedburner's email subscription tool include:

Giving you the code for a "subscribe by email" link to put into your blog
Receive the email addresses that people enter after clicking on the subscribe link.
Checking that the email-address owner really did sign up (ie that it wasn't just someone else signing up for them), by sending a validation email and checking the response
Putting validated subscriber addresses into a database
Sending a message to the addresses in the database when you post to your blog
Dealing with requests to un-subscribe from your blog, and with undelivered messages (eg because the address has been deleted).

Once you have burned a feed using Feedburner, all you need to do to access these services is to activate the email service, and give people viewing your blog a way to subscribe to the email messages.

Setting up a "Subscribe by email" option for your blog:

The Easy option:

Blogger now provide a Follow-by-email gadget. You can add this to your blog in the same way as you add any gadget. Adding the gadget sets up a feed, starts the email service, and puts a place on your blog where visitors can leave their email addresses.

This is the easiest way to get started - but if you use it, you cannot customise the sign-up form, and won't be shown where to set up your email message content. And it only works if you're using Blogger.

The Manual option:

Follow these steps to add an email subscription option yourself.

1 Burn a feed for you blog

2 Go to the Publicize tab in Feedburner

3 Go to the email subscriptions tab (on the left side)

4 Choose Activate to start the service.

5 The Subscription management tab has two options.

The top one gives you a subscription form to put into your blog, which includes a field where your viewer can enter their mail address. To use it:
a) Choose the language that you want the subscription-tool to use
b) Copy the code from the box under "Subscription Form Code", or use the "Use as a widget" option

The bottom one gives you a link to put into your site: when someone clicks on the link a new window opens, and the viewer can enter their email address in the window.
To use it, copy the code from the box under "Subscription Link Code", or use the "Use as a widget" option

No matter which option you choose, you can either:

Insert the code manually:
If you have copied the HTML code, you need to put it into your blog: it can go into a gadget or into a Post or Page - most people use gadgets.

Insert the code using the auto-insert tool (the "use as a widget" option):
If you want to use the auto-inert tool,choose Blogger from the correct (ie top or bottom) drop-down list, and press Go beside it. This opens a window where you can select which blog to add it to (if you have more than one), and also the title to give it.

When you press Add Widget, you are taken to the Design > Page Elements screen, where you can drag-and-drop the new widget into the place where you want it.

What your visitors see:

Web-browsers visitors:

After you have added the gadget, it simply looks like another option on your sidebar (or wherever you put it). When a visitor enters their email address, they are sent a confirmation message and provided they respond to this they also get a message every day that you have posted to your blog - see customising the messages that your email subscribers receive for more information about controlling the content and timing of these messages.

RSS-reader and email visitors

Any people who have already subscribed to your blog using using these tools will not see the subscribe-by-email option if you have installed it into a gadget, but will see if if you put it into a post. This is not a concern though: people who knew how to subscribe before you offered the option won't be surprised when they see you offering the option.