Free Wordpress Help | Setting Up RSS Feeds With Wordpress

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Setting Up RSS Feeds With Wordpress

Posted on July 9, 2008
Filed Under Guides, Plugin Help, RSS |

By now you have probably heard of RSS (Rich Site Summary or Really Simple Syndication) - if you have not then i recommend reading this before continuing to get a basic understanding, otherwise the following info will not be of much use.

RSS is used in your blog to syndicate your posts so users can basically get automatically ‘fed’ new posts as they are posted. The writings are ‘pushed’ out to the users who can read them either by a ‘Feed Reader’ such as Google’s (there are millions around), or by email if they have subscribed to an email RSS feed.

Wordpress themes will usually come pre-setup with RSS and it helps that Wordpress as a platform is very feed-friendly. This makes our job all that much easier.

First step i will recommend is set yourself up with a feed manager. One of the best around is Feedburner. If you dont already have an account set up with them then you better hop right over now and sign up. It’s totally free and will allow you to manage all of your feeds from a single point of administration. This is particularly useful when you have multiple blogs that you want to use RSS for. It’s pretty simple to sign up there, just follow all the steps, but one key point here is to note down the ‘feed address’ you choose when you ‘burn a feed’ for your site. Usually (but not always) it will look something like this:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/<yoursitename> (e.g. http://feeds.feedburner.com/WordpressNinja)

This is important because you will need it for the next step.

So you have a new theme installed and it has an RSS logo there (you know, the funky orange and white square thingy) somewhere but you dont know how to use it. Let’s turn that lifeless orange RSS logo into a Feedburner RSS feed that will have your users queing up to subscribe to!

First of all, don’t just accept the default theme logo image that you are given. Feel free to use any image you like for it. There are some really cool, creative ways of using that logo, so go ahead and experiment if you are good at Photoshop :)

Ok, so the only tricky part here is finding out which file you need to edit. Analyze your site layout and determine where the RSS logo is located. Usually it is in the header, but sometimes you can find it in the sidebar. For the former you would edit header.php and the latter sidebar.php (NB your Wordpress theme may have variations on this e.g. some i have seen with a left_sidebar.php and a right_sidebar.php). Once you determine the file you need to edit, open it in your editor of choice. If you need help selecting a code editor you can refer to my guide here.

First let’s do a standard feed via a feedreader device. I should also mention that if you configure your feed within your Feedburner account to accept Email Subscriptions as well, then when anyone clicks on your RSS icon they will come to a Feedburner splash screen that will give them an option to subscribe via a reader OR via email. I’ll show you a cooler way to do an email subscription later on.

So you will want to find this code snippet in your file:

<a href="<?php bloginfo('rss_url'); ?>" title="Subscribe to RSS feed" rel="nofollow"><img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/images/rss-feed-icon.jpg" alt="Subscribe to RSS feed" /></a>

You should change it to this so it will use your Feedburner account - basically just replace the href link section with your feed url. So using the feed url example from above:

<a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/<yoursitename>" title="Subscribe to RSS feed" rel="nofollow"><img src="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/images/rss-feed-icon.jpg" alt="Subscribe to RSS feed" /></a>

That’s it. Simple huh. Save the file then re-upload it back to your server, replacing the old file there.

If you want to change the image used for the RSS icon then you would use the same code as above but change the url within the quotes so that it points to the correct image path.

Ok, so that’s basically it, very simple to set up a Feedburner Feed account. One last thing i’ll show you is a cool way to do an email subscription seperately from your RSS icon. This code generates output similar to the graphic below it, but the best thing is it takes you directly to the email subscribe from feedburner and your user’s can skip several steps. I also noticed that many users are not aware that the standard RSS link can also give them access to Email Subscriptions. One small note if you use this, change the fields <YourFeed> and <FeedID> - you can find the <FeedID> number in your Feedburner account under the ‘Publicize’ tab and Email Subscriptions.

<li><form style="color:#5C82EF;border:1px solid #ccc;text-align:center;" action="http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailverify" method="post" target="popupwindow" onsubmit="window.open('http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/emailverifySubmit?feedId=<FeedID>', 'popupwindow', 'scrollbars=yes,width=550,height=520');return true"><p>Subscribe to email feed:</p><p><input type="text" value="<Email Address>" style="width:140px" name="email" onfocus="if (this.value == '<Email Address>') {this.value = '';}" onblur="if (this.value == '') {this.value = '<Email Address>';}"/></p><input type="hidden" value="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~e?ffid=<FeedID>" name="url"/><input type="hidden" value="<YourFeed>" name="title"/><input type="hidden" name="loc" value="en_US"/><input type="submit" value="Subscribe" /></form></li>

As always - any questions, feel free to leave a comment below or email me.

Comments

10 Responses to “Setting Up RSS Feeds With Wordpress”

  1. Cyrus Robinson on November 4th, 2008 8:50 am

    I’m new to this wordpress thing, and I’m trying to figure out how to set up RSS on my site. the subdomain is caney.cyrusrobinson.com but I have RaisingCaney.com forwarded to that address. When I try to set up my RSS to redirect and show RaisingCaney.com it won’t do it (says it is a webpage, not a blog). It WILL allow me to set up an RSS feed to caney.cyrusrobinson.com, but this defeats the purpose of me using the RaisingCaney.com domain. Any tips?

  2. Glendale on November 25th, 2008 11:41 am

    I also have a similar question
    My rss feeds on Wordpress blogs seem to set up erratically in that some work and others set up in the same way do not
    I now realize that some of the working feeds were on single domains wheras some of the non working domains were on add on domains on a primary host
    Still some of the ad on domains seem to work just fine wheras others do not
    What would be the correct setup for an rss feed for an add on domain ?

    thank you

  3. kurt on March 2nd, 2009 6:11 pm

    I just got my blog setup and setup a feedburner account. The template I am using, Atahualpa, calls for a “ffid” and I only have a “feedID”. Do you know how I can get the other ID?

  4. WPNinja on March 3rd, 2009 4:15 am

    It is simply your Feedburner ID, which you can find as i described above at the end of the article. You can find it in Feedburner.com under Publicize>Email Subscriptions. Look in the code snippet for

    window.open('http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=MyFeedID‘, ‘popupwindow’, ’scrollbars=yes,width=550,height=520′)

    OR something very similar. The ID is this example is ‘MyFeedID‘

  5. Al Kiel on September 11th, 2009 2:34 am

    I am trying to figure out how to get a MP3 audio set up as a RSS feed so feedburner can find it and get it set so I can get it onto I-tunes.

    I need help.

  6. cat on January 24th, 2010 3:34 am

    hi,

    i really need help with this one. I followed your instructions to change the header code, but was still unsuccessful. Here is the code:

    <link rel=”stylesheet” href=”" type=”text/css” media=”screen” />
    <link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=” RSS Feed” href=”" />
    <link rel=”pingback” href=”" />

    <link rel=”stylesheet” href=”/style-ie.css” type=”text/css” media=”screen” />

    var png_blank = “/images/transparent.gif”;

    any pointers?

    Thank you!

  7. cat on January 24th, 2010 3:35 am

    oops, here’s the code again.

    <link rel=”stylesheet” href=”" type=”text/css” media=”screen” />
    <link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=” RSS Feed” href=”" />
    <link rel=”pingback” href=”" />

    <link rel=”stylesheet” href=”/style-ie.css” type=”text/css” media=”screen” />

    var png_blank = “/images/transparent.gif”;

  8. cat on January 24th, 2010 3:35 am

    hmm, the comment section won’t let me post the whole thing. :(

  9. louis vuitton on June 23rd, 2010 8:52 am

    It is simply your Feedburner ID, which you can find as i described above at the end of the article. You can find it in Feedburner.com under Publicize>Email Subscriptions. Look in the code snippet for

  10. Louis Vuitton Bags on July 30th, 2010 5:53 am

    I really need help with this one.

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