BlogHarbor Home Page
FAQFAQ  SearchSearch  MemberlistMemberlist  UsergroupsUsergroups  UsergroupsRSS   RegisterRegister 
 ProfileProfile   Log in to check your private messagesLog in to check your private messages   Log inLog in 
Re-routing to FeedBurner
 
Post new topic   Reply to topic    BlogHarbor Community Forum Index -> General Discussion
View previous topic :: View next topic  
Author Message
zoli



Joined: 27 Jun 2005
Posts: 108

PostPosted: Thu Sep 01, 2005 12:24 pm    Post subject: Re-routing to FeedBurner Reply with quote

John,

In another post you said, after creating a FeedBurner feed " you can alter your blog templates and components to reference your FeedBurner feed instead of the one we are generating."

Can you pls. elaborate what and where I need to change? The objective (I think...) is two-fold:

- to have one single feed offered by my blog, that is the Feedburner one
- to get existing readers receive the new one automatically

Thanks a lot,
Zoli
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Visit poster's website
john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Thu Sep 01, 2005 10:19 pm    Post subject: Re: Re-routing to FeedBurner Reply with quote

First, two points:

1) Our system provides not only a main RSS feed which mirrors the content on your Main Page, but also an RSS feed for each of your categories.

2) We also provide for Authenticated RSS, so if you are using restricted categories and have an RSS aggregator that supports authenticated RSS, you can read content from a restricted category using the same Username/Password you would use if you'd logged in directly at the weblog.

If either of these are important to you, then I don't have any suggestions on how you can retain those features and use a third party service like Feedburner to transform your RSS feed.

If you want to replace your original BlogHarbor generated RSS feed with the Feedburner version of that feed, you will simply need to remove any existing references to the URL of the original RSS newsfeed on your blog and replace them with the new URL of your Feedburner feed.

First, remove or modify any sidebar components on your blog which refer to your current RSS newsfeed. Also, remove the Subscribe component, since that lists your main and category RSS feeds so you don't want anyone to inadvertantly subscribe to the original versions of your feeds. The Subscribe component allows users to subscribe by email, so you'll lose that feature.

Next, add your own custom component which links to your Feedburner RSS feed.

Finally, you'll want to alter your base template so that the auto-discovery systems find your new RSS feed instead of your original one. This is the tricky part. We automatically create everything in the <HEAD> area of your html for you. Your RSS address, CSS links, keywords, description, and custom Javascript are all derived automatically based on the template you choose in the Look & Feel section of the control panel or based on values you entered into the Settings area of the control panel.

If you want to replace this information, do a View Source of your main page. Copy everything between the <title> and </head> sections of your html. Now you'll need to go into your base template, and you'll see that the only thing in there between the <title> and </head> sections is this code:

Code:
{{include name="system_head.html"}}

{{blog.custom_head}}


Replace that with the content you copied when you did a View Source. Remove the <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" lines, and replace them with the URL of your Feedburner feed:

Code:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="PutYourFeedburnerURLHere" />


That about sums things up. Just remember that your HEAD area will no longer be managed by our system, so if you change your keywords, description, add custom CSS, etc., you would need to go back and update your base template accordingly.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Send e-mail Visit poster's website
john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Thu Sep 01, 2005 10:37 pm    Post subject: Re: Re-routing to FeedBurner Reply with quote

to get existing readers receive the new one automatically

That one I forgot to answer, and I don't think it's possible. That's not unique to our service, I see that the other Very Popular Hosted Weblog Service also wouldn't be able to do this. You'd need to be hosting your own shared server to do some kind of redirect which might accomplish the automatically part. I think your best bet in your case would be to create a post explaining where to get your new feed. Anyone reading your old feed exclusively should see it and switch accordingly.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Send e-mail Visit poster's website
zoli



Joined: 27 Jun 2005
Posts: 108

PostPosted: Fri Sep 02, 2005 12:41 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

John, thanks, this was extensive - you made me realize I did not want to lose the emal subscription, so I will probably leave all intact, except that I already have the feedburner subscription component in the sidebar. That leaves me with 2 questions:
- When someone does auto-discovery on my blog, I suppose they will get both the default and the feedburner url?

- this is more a clarification, and has to do with extracts. I'd like to provide full feed for RSS subsribers, but only a manually written summary for trackback on other logs. I don't think it's possible, is it? I.E. if I use the excerpt field for short summary, that will become my feed? In which case I thought the Feedburner thingie is my solution, i.e. use excerpts for short summary, but full feed via feedburner.

Thanks a lot,
Zoli
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Visit poster's website
john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Fri Sep 02, 2005 7:16 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

John, thanks, this was extensive - you made me realize I did not want to lose the emal subscription

Not sure how many people would actually use the RSS feed listings on that page to get the URL to subscribe to from the Subscribe page, but it was just an issue I wanted to point out.

When someone does auto-discovery on my blog, I suppose they will get both the default and the feedburner url?

Auto-discovery is done solely be examining the HEAD area of the web page, so adding the Feedburner URL to your sidebar will not change the URL for autodiscovery; the default RSS URL would continue to be the one found via autodiscovery.

I.E. if I use the excerpt field for short summary, that will become my feed?

Yes, if you use an excerpt on your blog the excerpt appears on your RSS feed, and if you do not the full text of the article appears instead. We have noted suggestions for enhancement to this feature. Wink
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Send e-mail Visit poster's website
Alan



Joined: 26 Oct 2005
Posts: 5
Location: California

PostPosted: Fri Oct 28, 2005 5:41 pm    Post subject: RSS component required in header? Reply with quote

1. Is it necessary to manually place the "Full RSS Link" and "Category RSS Link" components in the header to activate the RSS feed feature, or is that functionality already built into the Blogharbor auto-generated header code?

2. Considering John's comments about the advantages of Blogharbor's RSS features, as discussed in the posts below, there appears to be no advantage to embedding Feedburner or any other newsfeed chicklets on my blog page. Does anyone want to share their insights about that?

Thank you!
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Visit poster's website
john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Fri Oct 28, 2005 11:13 pm    Post subject: Re: RSS component required in header? Reply with quote

it necessary to manually place the "Full RSS Link" and "Category RSS Link" components in the header to activate the RSS feed feature, or is that functionality already built into the Blogharbor auto-generated header code?

By default, the base template of your blog contains the links to your main RSS feed.

So if you are asking if you need to do anything to enable them, the answer is no. If you are asking if you want to ensure that your readers access your Feedburner feed and not your default feed created by us, then yes, you would need to modify your base template to remove these links as described earlier in this thread.

Considering John's comments about the advantages of Blogharbor's RSS features, as discussed in the posts below, there appears to be no advantage to embedding Feedburner or any other newsfeed chicklets on my blog page. Does anyone want to share their insights about that?

I'll share my thoughts, and if anyone else has any opinions please feel free.

There are advantages and disadvantages to replacing your default feed with a Feedburner feed. In addition to the disadvantages noted earlier (lack of support for or integration with our ability to do multiple category-based RSS feeds or authenticated feeds), there are probably a few others. One would be that your feed will likely begin displaying advertising supplied by Feedburner.

Feedburner does some things really well. It has excellent stats, and makes a nice guess for you at the number of readers your blog might have. (Most people don't realize that it is just a guess based on a variety of factors; reading an RSS feed is nothing like subscribing to a mail list so there's no way to tell how many subscribers you really have. But it's a good guess, and useful info.)

In addition, for media bloggers like podcasters and vbloggers, the service has the ability to splice enclosures from other sources into your feed. So you can add MP3 files and quicktime movies directly into your feed itself, even if those files are not added to your article as attachments which would be the standard way of adding an enclosure to your blog's RSS feed. The benefit here would be that if you have a lot of downloads of your media, you can host the media somewhere like OurMedia.org, which promises "free storage and free bandwidth for your videos, audio files, photos, text or software. Forever. No catches." So you can upload your podcast to OurMedia, and no matter how many times it is downloaded, your BlogHarbor bandwidth will not be affected.

Those are a few more of the pros and cons. As always, there are tradeoffs, and the your decision will depend on which features and capabilities are most important to you.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Send e-mail Visit poster's website
zoli



Joined: 27 Jun 2005
Posts: 108

PostPosted: Sun Feb 25, 2007 10:53 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

John,

I've finally made the changes you describe above - of course it worked, but a weird "side effect" (?) is that on stats ALL my posts show up with this title line" "Zoli's Blog: Main Page". Statcounter, Clicky, Feedburner - you name it. They all went crazy the day I made the change.

Thanks for checking,
Zoli
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Visit poster's website
john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Mon Feb 26, 2007 1:55 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Looks like you made a mistake when editing your base template. You put this in your base template:

Code:
<title>Zoli's Blog :: Main Page</title>


So every page on your blog will of course now be named "Zoli's Blog :: Main Page".

The original code was this:

Code:
<title>{{blog.name}}{{if page.title}} :: {{page.title}}{{/if}}</title>


Change it and your blog will have a dynamic title again.
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Send e-mail Visit poster's website
zoli



Joined: 27 Jun 2005
Posts: 108

PostPosted: Mon Feb 26, 2007 8:35 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

Yes, I did that - because I was supposed to replace everything between the <title> and </head> sections with what I copied from Source View, and that included the text of the title, not the system variables...

Thanks, fixed now Razz
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Visit poster's website
john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Mon Feb 26, 2007 12:20 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

You're right, my instructions did not specify that. Sorry about that!
Back to top
View user's profile Send private message Send e-mail Visit poster's website
Search all BlogHarbor support resources.
View previous topic :: View next topic  
Display posts from previous:   
Post new topic   Reply to topic    BlogHarbor Community Forum Index -> General Discussion All times are GMT - 5 Hours
Page 1 of 1

 
Jump to:  
You cannot post new topics in this forum
You cannot reply to topics in this forum
You cannot edit your posts in this forum
You cannot delete your posts in this forum
You cannot vote in polls in this forum