Site Feed

The "site feed" section creates your RSS feed. This allows me, or a webmaster in Hong Kong, or one of your site's loyal visitors, to receive your posting on their website, on their browser, or in a desktop aggregator. This is the syndication part of the RSS/Blogging process.

You want to publish your site feed, if you are hoping that your content will show up on other people's websites, or if you are using the blog as a substitute for an email newsletter. Even if you don't publicize your feed URL, you may want to set up an RSS feed to use on your own webpages.

You can choose short descriptions or full descriptions. This affects how much of your post will appear on other websites or in your subscriber's aggregator program. My philosophy is that short description, if written well, will get readers interested enough to click on the linked headline. This will bring reader back to your website. A full description publishes your entire post on the other website. It's ok to do it that way if you want to.

These are the site feed settings that work on my website:

Site Feed Server path: /public_html/blog/
Site Feed Filename : atom.xml
Site Feed URL:http://www.bblogger-express.com/atom.xml

If Blogger.com is hosting your blog. the site feed URL will be automatically filled in. This is the URL that you will be giving to the RSS directories, and this is the URL that your subscribers will add to their news aggregators. It's important to get this one right.

To check to make sure your feed is working, go to http://feedvalidator.org/ and type in the Site Feed URL exactly as it appears on the Site Feed page of Blogger.com Click on "validate" and hope that you get this very nice message:

Congratulations!

This is a valid Atom 1.0 feed.


You now have a working blog and an RSS feed that will syndicate your musings to the websites and surfers of the world. It wasn't all that hard, and so far, it hasn't cost you a dime.