RSS: How to Find Your Blog’s Feed
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RSS is short for Really Simple Syndication. When you think of the word ‘syndication’ you probably think about a syndicated newspaper column, meaning the column appears in a variety of newspapers around the country or the world. There’s also syndicated television. A program that goes ‘into syndication’ is picked up by a large number of television stations for rebroadcast.
So how does this syndication apply to you? You make use of RSS when you make your blog entries available for syndication. RSS is really what sets a blog apart from a regular old website.
You may know that a blog is really just a simple content management system. You enter your text and it creates pages for you and sets up navigation to the page. When you post to a blog, it also adds information about your post to a special RSS file that becomes your ‘feed’.
The location of this feed file becomes your ‘feed address’ otherwise known as your ‘RSS feed’. This is all done automatically so you don’t really have to know a lot about how it happens, just that it does happen. What is important is that you take advantage of the RSS feed and use it to promote your blog.
How do you find your RSS feed?
These are all ideas and hopefully one will work for you. I know, why can’t I give you an easy answer. Well because all computers (PC/Mac), browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google, etc), blog systems (WordPress, Blogger, etc.), RSS versions (RSS 1.0, 2.0, etc) and general computer understanding is different. That’s a lot to work with. So I’ll do my best to offer you ideas below, try them out and if it doesn’t work, you can contact me here and ask me what your RSS Feed is.
Option #1 Use the Buttons
Look for this icons on your blog site or on your browser somewhere and click on it:
Option #2 Add Feed
Enter in your own blog address and add the word “feed” or “rss”: http://www.debbiemcneill.com/blog/feed.
Option #3 Use a Feed Service
Many of the feedservices will allow you to enter in your Blog’s URL and it will give you your Feed URL. I would say try Feedburner or Bloglines, but both I think require you to register or open a new account.
For more information, I have found these websites helpful.
Make sure you update your feed as needed and stay on top of RSS technology. It has changed over the years; there are actually three types of RSS feeds and you want to ensure you’re giving your visitors the best you have to offer.
