How to create your own FeedBurner FeedFlares
Feedburner FeedFlares give you some pretty good ways to play around with your blog’s feeds. Most of us are using a few pre-configured text snippets at the end of each of our posts in RSS like “Digg This” or Comments count. But, what if we can create our own FeedFlares? With our own text and functionality? Wouldn’t it be cooler?
Well, for those of you who are anticipating this to be really hard and really tech-savvy work, I would just have to say - There’s nothing to it!
Step 1: Install the FeedFlare
Log on to your FeedBurner account, choose your blog’s feed and go to the Optimize tab - from which you can choose “FeedFlare”. Make sure your FeedFlare is already running on your RSS Feed. If not, just install it.
It should be pretty easy to do so with their on-screen help feature.
A simple introduction to XML before the next step
Those of you who have no idea of what an XML files is, just know that it’s something like HTML, in which you can define your own tags.
For an instance, HTML will have predefined tags like <head>, <body>, <img> and etc., while XML will let you build your own tags, to carry data between web services. A sample code may look like this:
<ThisIsATest> <MyName>Nadeesha</MyName> <MyMessage>Writing a sample XML file</MyMessage> <SomeTag>I can define any number of Tags, anyway I want</SomeTag> </ThisIsATest>
So that seems pretty simple right? If you want to get the inside scoop on everything related to XML, just check these tutorials.
Step 2: Creating your own XML file
If you’re subscribed to the ROCKFUSE RSS Feeds, you might have seen that there’s a big banner at the end of each post allowing you to download the “Free Blog Headers” pack. As the demonstration of this tutorial, I’m going to make a text link and have it appear with the other FeedFlares, instead of the banner. So, for this purpose, we’ll create a simple XML file with an anchor text and a URL.
1. Open Notepad(Windows) or any other simple text editor.
2. Simply type in the following code:
<FeedFlareUnit> <Catalog> <Title>Free Blog Headers</Title> <Description>Download 20 Free Customizable Niche Blog Headers</Description> </Catalog> <FeedFlare> <Text>Free Blog Headers</Text> <Link href="http://www.rockfuse.com/blog/free-blog-headers"/> </FeedFlare> </FeedFlareUnit>
Remember to replace the <title>,<description>,<text> and <link> tags with appropriate values.
<title> : The name of your FeedFlare
<description> : A small description
<text> : The anchor text which appears at the end of the feed
<link> : Where the anchor text leads to when you click the feed flare
3. Save it as a XML file and upload the XML file to your hosting account. (For an instance, let’s say I uploaded mine to match http://www.rockfuse.com/freeblogheaders.xml)
4. Then, go to the FeedFlare section in your FeedBurner account (the one you opened in Step 1) and in the “Add New Flare” field, type in the URL for the XML file.
5. You’re done! Specify whether the flare should appear in blog posts in the blog and RSS Feed both or one in particular. (I would limit mine to the RSS Feed only since it’s Subscriber only bonus)
At this point, if you’re anxious to see the result, just ping FeedBurner and it’ll put your new FeedFlare on all of your posts. That’s it! Wasn’t so hard now, was it?
interesting stuff. This is a good step by step how-to article. Keep up the good blogging.
indeed that was too easy
I wanted to do this a long time ago, I thought it was more difficult… Thanks for making it so simple