Blogs, Blogging, RSS Feeds

I was down at SES London last week and sat in on the Blogs and RSS feeds session. Keen to implement the tips I picked up, I've been working on Blog related things over the weekend in an attempt to improve the rather drab ammount of traffic to our Blog.

Burn your feed with Feedburner

I'd never heard about Feedburner before and it was only mentioned very briefly during the seminar but I noted it down as something to investigate when I reurned.

So what does Feedburner do?

"FeedBurner is the world's largest feed management provider. Our Web-based services help bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers promote, deliver and profit from their content on the Web."

In real terms what it does is turn your RSS feed from an XML or Atom feed into their own "SmartFeed" format. With some RSS readers favouring either XML or Atom and no standard imminent on the horizon SmartFeed turns your RSS feed into a format readable on any device. It also makes the feed look much prettier than the standard XML or Atom feed. This is our RSS feed in standard Atom feed format, and this is our RSS feed formated by SmartFeed, the Feedburner format. Actually it does a lot more than that and I'll try to cover as much as I can over this multi-part post.

Chicklets

I didn't have a name for these but after SES London I do. Apparently these,





little graphics are called "Chicklets". I'd always called them, "the little graphic things" and I find Chicklets to be a bit feminine but if that's what it's been decided they'll be called who am I to change that. Particularly given that I don't have any other ideas.
You'll be able to see that below the navigation on the right hand side there's now a long list of Chicklets for various different RSS news readers. This one, is now the standard RSS feed icon. The idea behind showing the various different Chicklets is that you are making it as easy as possible for end users to subscribe to your RSS feed. They simply click on the Chicklet that is relevant for their news reader and instantly subscribe to your feed, and that's what we want to happen.


Tags: Virtuaffinity RSS Feed Virtuaffinity Blog