Many a blog post out of frustration is born.

I recently pulled out most of my hair while attempting to discern why our FeedBurner email signature (created with the Headline Animator) was broken.

Here’s the quick story, and the solution.

The Headline Animator Problem

Normally, you can create an email signature with the Headline Animator that will scroll through your latest five posts:

I had created this a few months ago, and it worked fine.

This week I tried to implement it in our company’s email. I got this message, “Watch this space for future items!”

So, I did what any other lazy tech-type would do: I ignored the problem and tried to create a new Headline Animator. I went through the motions and hit Save. Here is what I saw next:

(Read the full article…)

View related topics: atom, feeds, rss

I recently posted an article on Complete Blog Optimization Guidelines that covered optimizing three key areas of your blog: Feeds, Your Blog as a Whole, and Individual Blog Posts.

This is part one of a three-part follow-up series to those guidelines that provides WordPress platform-specific solutions for optimizing your RSS and Atom feeds.

Note: These tips assume you are using WordPress as an installed application on your own dedicated or shared server, and not as a free hosted blog on wordpress.com. These tips do not take into account any WordPress upgrades in the recently released version 2.3.

1. Enable Full Text in Your Feed

There are a variety of arguments in favor of full text feeds, as opposed to partial text feeds. I tend to agree with the full text arguments, and the click-through rate is pretty much equal for both. To enable full text in your feeds go to your WordPress Admin, and then to Options >> Reading and click the Full text radio button (see graphic below). Note that if you use the ‘more’ feature in your posts, your feeds will still be cut off even after choosing the Full text option. To fix this, install the Full Text Feed plugin.

2. Show the Most Recent 20 Posts in your Feed

Including the most recent 20 posts in your feed means more content for new subscribers and more chances your posts will be passed around. Under Options>>Reading change the default to 20 in the Show the most recent posts text field.

3. Add Categories at the Feed Level

Categories are automatically included for each post in your feed, but you can also add feed level categories which act as meta information for your entire blog. You need to manually edit your feed file to accomplish this. Don’t worry, it’s not hard.

Find the wp-includes folder in the root directory of your blog’s file structure. For example, this blog’s wp-includes folder is located at: http://www.closed-loop-marketing.com/blog/wp-includes. You will find the .php files you need to edit in this folder.

For RSS 2 (WordPress default):

Open the feed-rss2.php file for editing. You can insert multiple categories. Each category uses a start and end tag. For example:

<category>Giant Spiders</category>

<category>Arachnid Diaries</category>

These categories just need to be placed after the opening <channel> element but before the opening <item> element. If in doubt, place them just after the feed <title> element like this:

<channel>

<title>The CLM Blog</title>

<category>Category 1</category>

<category>Category 2</category>

For Atom:

Open the feed-atom.php file for editing. The Atom category syntax is different from RSS 2. Example:

<category term="Squid Food" />

<category term="Shrimp" />

For Atom, these categories need to be placed after the opening <feed> element but before the opening <entry> element. Again, a good place is directly after the feed <title> element. So an example might be:

<feed xmlns=http://www.w3.org/2005/atom …[various other cryptic writings]…>


<title type="text">The CLM Blog</title>

<category term="Category 1" />

<category term="Category 2" />

Both RSS 2 and Atom feed-level categories allow for extra attributes or elements within the <category> element. Read more about feed categories in the RSS 2 spec and the Atom spec.

4. Add an Image or Logo to your Feed

Adding an image to your feed will help it stand out from the crowd. Not many feed readers support it yet, but it’s simple to implement for those that do. You will need to edit the same feed file that you added categories to in the previous section.

For RSS 2:

Open the feed-rss2.php file for editing. The image you will be adding should have a maximum width of 144 pixels and a maximum height of 400 pixels. Insert the code after the opening <channel> element.

<channel>

<image>

<url>path-to-your-image.gif</url>

<title>The CLM Blog</title>

<link>http://www.closed-loop-marketing.com/blog/</link>

<width>88</width>

<height>31</height>

<description> Expert commentary and advice on SEM, SEO, usability, conversion enhancement, and the web.</description>

</image>

For Atom:

Open the feed-atom.php file for editing. Atom doesn’t specify height or width values, but make sure the image is sized reasonably to display in feed readers that allow images. Insert the code after the opening <feed> element.

<feed>


<logo>path-to-your-image.gif</logo>

That’s all there is to it. You can subscribe to your blog using Bloglines to see the image in action.

5. Enable Autodiscovery:

Enabling autodiscovery makes it that much easier for people to subscribe to your feed. This is enabled by default in WordPress for your main blog. However, if you’d like to enable autodiscovery of your blog on a different site, like your company’s main corporate site, then here is what to do:

Pick the page(s) you want your blog to be discovered on and open it for editing. Anywhere in between the <head></head> elements, insert the following <link> element code (you can specify a different title attribute if wanted):

For RSS 2:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://closed-loop-marketing.com/blog/feed/" />


For Atom:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom" href="http://closed-loop-marketing.com/blog/feed/atom/" />

Note: Replace http://closed-loop-marketing.com/blog/ with your blog’s root directory. For example, http://closed-loop-marketing.com/blog/feed/ becomes http://the-path-to-your-blog-root-directory/feed/.

The code above assumes that you are using custom permalinks that are name based. If you are still using the default permalinks with query strings like ?p=140, then either switch to name based permalinks under Options >> Permalinks (recommended), or use the following code instead:

For RSS 2:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://closed-loop-marketing.com/blog/?feed=rss2" />


For Atom:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom" href="http://closed-loop-marketing.com/blog/?feed=atom" />

Following these RSS and Atom feed optimization tips will increase your blog’s visibility and can help your feed stand out from the pack. I’ll be following up with parts 2 and 3 on WordPress optimization for Your Blog as a Whole and for Individual Blog Posts soon, so keep an eye out!

View related topics: atom, blog-optimization, blog-visibility, feeds, increase-blog-traffic, rss