“What a Lovely Way to Burn”. Install the “Feed Burner Redirection Plugin” To Optimize Your WordPress Blog

Friday, January 13th, 2012 at 5:38 am

Now that we are on the topic of WordPress plugins lets continue with another plugin that is a necessary enhancement if you wish your rss feeds to work to their optimum. I am speaking about the “FeedBurner Redirection Plugin”. What this does is take your standard rss feeds and adds tracking and email notification, which is good if you don’t subscribe to an auto responder. It also makes the rss feed more browser friendly and easier for your readers to subscribe too, plus other features, which we won’t go into now.

Click on the “Add New” menu under plugins and enter “Feedburner”
In the list that comes up click “Install Now” under the plugin “TentBlogger RSS FeedBurner Redirect” and then activate it.

Now that you have activated the plugin go to feedburner.com and set up an account if you do not have one.

You are now ready so go to FeedBurner and in the box beside where is says, “Burn a feed right this instant”, paste in your blog feed address and hit “next”.

(You may want an rss feed for your comments at a later date, when that time comes, just follow the same protocol except type in your comments feed address instead.)

Hitting the last “Next” button brought you to a second page where you can now edit the “feed title” if you want to, and also the feed address, only the part that is in the lower box however.

When you hit “Next” it will go to a new window that says it is a valid feed. (If perchance the feed was not valid it will take you to a feed validation and correction page where you are given instructions and links to make the necessary changes.) Hitting “Next” again takes you to an itunes setup page which you can fill in later if you want too and go on to a page entitled, “Get More Gusto From Your Feed Traffic Stats”, this you can leave until later, if you so choose. The last “Next” takes you to a page that states you have successfully updated your feed.

Now go to your WordPress dashboard and click on the “TentBlogger” plugin that you installed earlier, it shows in the lower left side bar, click on it and it will take you to a configuration page where you can enter your “feedburner address” and beneath that your “feedburner address for comment feeds” if you should choose to install it at a later date.

The question that you are now asking is where can I find my feed addresses. To save you a lot of hunting go to this link, it has lots of good stuff and Lorelle’s website will be able to answer all of your questions. http://lorelle.wordpress.com/2007/01/24/understanding-using-and-customizing-wordpress-blog-feeds/.

In summary this post has shown how to take both the blog and its comment feeds, that are part of all WordPress blogs, and enhance them with FeedBurner. The following feed addresses are examples with no permalinks.( Lorelle’s web site shows both with and without permalinks.)

Blog feed: http://example.com/?feed=rss2
Blog FeedBurner feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/(blog name with no .com).