Running Your Feed through Feedburner

After creating a Feed, for Joomla, WordPress or Drupal website or Blog, you should run it though FeedBurner!

Why? First.. its Free.. but more important are some of the great featurs that come with using this service.
(NB if you want more than the Free options, you can always upgrade your account, but the free ones will do oké for now)

From your Content management system you will get a link that should show you the feed in a xml format.
Copy this link and save it Burn you feed!

Now go to feedburner and login, if you don't have an account yet, create one, as said, its free.

Once you are in there you can create a "New Feed" mostly there is a nice link almost at the bottom that says "Burn a feed right this instance"
Paste your Feed xml URL into the field below that sentence!

Once you have done that, activate the Feed.

Next.. what options to use and how to use them

There are a lot of options at Feedbruner, nicely grouped together in a few Tabbed screens.

One of the First ones your need to activate is the Smartfeed option on the Optimize tab

This option lets your RSS Feed readers choose the Feed Application thy want to use and in a much easier way then you putting all kinds of reader Chicklets on your site.
You still can do, that is the fun with Feedburner.

After that, first thing to do next is to get the code from Feedburner by using the Chicklet chooser:

Way down below you can find the code you need for bringing the feed to your website:

The Next steps for Joomla webmasters:

First make sure your editor doesn't corrupt your HTML, or switch to "No WYSIWYG editor" in your Global config, or in your user settings!

Now go to the Module section of your administrators panel, and hit "new" and past the HTML code into the code box.

Change the code after icon32x32.png alt" " to a text like "Subscribe to my SEO for Open Source Feed", well something of your own af course.
Do the some with the text "Subscribe in a reader"... and if your really want to go all out, change the Icon to one of you own by simply replacing the link to the icon32x32png to your own image.

Give it a nice title if you want, publish the new Feed module some place where it's really good visible so any visitor can see that you offer an RSS Feed.

O, and just two tips:
1. If you have one Feed or a main feed for your site, add this line into the head of your template index file:

<link title="RSS" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/HummerbieInternetIdeasAndThoughts" type="application/rss+xml" rel="alternate" />

That would help me get more subscribers :-) , no kidding, change the last part to your own feed.
You will see that IE7 and Firefox and Opera and... will see the presence of you feed automatically.

2. Don't show your subscriber numbers until you have a good number like above 75 or a 100 (depending on your niche). People are followers... so the first ones in are the part part, the larger the number the easier the growth.