The importance of RSS ... and what works for Wordpress

Replies to This Discussion

Permalink Reply by Two Go Round-The World on July 30, 2009 at 11:20am

Hey JoAnna — Feedburner 100%. Until I started using it, I had no idea how many people actually use RSS aggregators. Feebdburner's pretty solid. It provides nice formatting, good subscribe by email options and cool metrics.

Permalink Reply by Alex Berger on July 30, 2009 at 11:23am

As far as I know, you'll need to go with Feedburner or another similar tool. Feedburner is usually the most widely used and is now part of google.

Permalink Reply by JoAnna Haugen on July 30, 2009 at 11:28am

Thanks for the feedback TGRTW and Alex!

Is it obvious how I incorporate Feedburner into my site and remove the RSS feed? (I'm just not very tech oriented, so even the obvious stuff isn't so obvious sometimes.)

Permalink Reply by Simon on July 31, 2009 at 12:54am

Hi JoAnna,

tks for having started this discussion. I learned something new. Great!

Cheers,
Simon

Permalink Reply by JoAnna Haugen on August 1, 2009 at 11:45am

I started the process to get a Feedburner account, but because I have a theme with an RSS feed built into it, I also needed to download the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin. Once I got to this point, I realized I don't have the WordPress Plugins Directory (which, according to a short film I watched online, should be located between the "Appearance" and "Users." Now I'm really stumped as to what to do, because I can't find anything anywhere about what to do if this menu is missing. It seems like everyone just has the Plugins Directory. Without that, I can't put the Feedsmith plugin in or put Feedburner on my page. So now my new question ... how the heck do I get the Plugins Directory? Do I need to contact Wordpress support to do that?

Permalink Reply by Dan on August 1, 2009 at 1:25pm

If you are using wordpress.com then you won't be able to use plugins. Plugins are only available for self hosted blogs. What you can do is find all the instances of the feed url in your theme template and change it to your feedburner url.