Smart ways to enhance your blog’s RSS feed
For quite some time I was wondering if it's possible to enhance the experience of rss subscribers in a non-intrusive and smart way.
As you know rss feed is usually read in an independent software without the reader actually being present on the site. What I had in mind is to find a way to improve the interaction between the blog and the reader. Information about this is scarce and hard to find on the net and that made me write this article after getting it all done.
I first discovered that it is possible to enter any data in the feed, just like you would format the content on the blog itself. That gave interesting possibility to include information about article comments, social bookmarking buttons and additional information. Adding this to a feed greatly increases the usability of your rss feed and blog potential.
I then discovered a plugin that enables this and it is called simply Better Feed. It is certainly a tool for advanced users, and allows you the complete control over the information that goes to your rss feed. While I usually like that, I was looking for a more practical and easier to use solution. And it was just around the corner...
Using Feedburner FeedFlare for feed control
You probably know that you can publish your blog feed through Feedburner (if you didn't I advise you to do so). It is a service that allows you full control of your rss feed as well as information about subscriber statistics and lot of other useful goodies. You can publish your feed through feedburner in 15 minutes after opening an account with them and using Feedsmith wordpress plugin to drive all your feeds through feedburner.
One of the features of Feedburner is called FeedFlare and is apparently most kept secret among pro-bloggers. It allows you to add any content to your feed footer through so called flares. Setting up is very easy, you select what you want to add (like comment count, social bookmarking ...) and Feedburner will automatically append it to the end of your feed! There is a selection of most popular flares and lot of third party ones just like wordpress plugins.
If you subscribe to my rss feed you can see how I used feedflare to add comments, social bookmarking links and copyright information to my rss feed. Check this image to see the feed in action.
Adding Related Posts to RSS feed
Another useful feature to have in your RSS feed are links to related articles (also displayed in the example above). This allows the reader to quickly browse to other similar articles about topic interesting to them.
In order to this, I have used Similar Feed Wordpress plugin. It is based on Similar posts plugin which is in turn most powerful "related posts" wordpress plugin in my opinion. Setup is quickly and automatic, as the similar feed plugin practically works out of the box.
Enhanced RSS Feed
With these two simple changes you can add a lot of value to your blog. The rss feed becomes more practical to use, resulting in better user experience which in turn increases the blog's karma.
Certainly there are other things that can be inserted into an rss feed. I leave this for your imagination...
About this entry
You’re currently reading “Smart ways to enhance your blog’s RSS feed,” an entry on Vladimir Prelovac site, published: Wednesday, December 12th, 2007
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Hi! My name is Vladimir Prelovac. I am a computer engineer by profession and an adventurer by state of mind.
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