serpentcouncil.com

We are going to continue with prepping our blog for public consumption, and we are going to introduce a set of tools from Google that are very useful for doing this.   The first one of these is called Feedburner, and it’s a terrific way to manage your feeds, which we touched upon previously.   First thing is if you don’t have a Google account, get one.   Having one will give you access to great set of tools, including all the ones we are going to work with here.   As well, it means you can have a gmail account which I am a huge fan of, in fact I use it as much as possible to manage all my mail.

Now, with your google account go to Feedburner.com and select Get Started.

Then you are given the option to "burn" a feed as below:

As you can see, I’m all set to burn my feed.   Click Next and Feedburner will query your site to determine what feeds are available to it.   By default when you setup WordPress, it will create 2 feeds.  One regular one which will be all your blog posts, and a second one for comments.    We are only going to deal with the regular one right now so select that and click Next.

I made one small change here to the feed name and shortened it from the default it gave me, serpentcouncilcom to serpentcouncil.   Select Next yet again and your feed is setup.

You now have the option of adding some additional features to your feed via FeedBurner which is one of the reasons we have selected to use FeedBurner.

First it asks what to track, I suggest that you just select everything it offers.  I did!

Now it’s the integration step.   You will be shown a bunch of option for all different blog types.  The one you are interested in is "Self-Hosted WordPress" (of course.)

When you click the link under that it will open another page which is a Google support page about FeedBurner.   The key aspect that we are interested in right now from this page is the link to the FeedBurner plugin.

Once you have downloaded this, you need to install it and activate it, which you can do per the method previously covered.  

Once that is done, go to Settings in your WordPress admin section and you will have a new option for Feedburner.  Click on that and you will presented with 2 text boxes.  One for your primary feed and one for your comment feed.   Put your feed address in the primary one.  In case you forgot what that was it will be something like mine listed here:  http://feeds2.feedburner.com/serpentcouncil.  You can check yours in your profile page at FeedBurner.com by clicking "My Feeds", select the name of your site(it will be in big blue letters" and then "Edit Feed Details."  Look for Feed Address.   That might sound complicated but it really isn’t and now your feed is managed through FeedBurner which is better then not being managed by FeedBurner.  If you don’t believe me then you should read this article - How and Why to use Feedburner.

Now that we have all that sorted out, we need to re-activate the link to subscribing to our feed which we removed when we were setting up our sidebar.   Go to Appearance > Widgets and select RSS Links from available Widgets.  Once it’s over on the list on the right select Edit.   The only option is to give it a tile, in my case I’m going with "Subscribe to the Feed."

We can do more with this later, but functionality wise, this is what we need.

Next time we are going to get into Google WebMaster tools and setup a sitemap