When we design our blogs, we tend to forget our visitors/users who’re following us with their feed readers. In this tutorial, we’re going to learn to “hack” our blog’s feed for a better feed reading experience for our users.
Now I know why when I open feed is not showing full content, It’s because your browser. Okay, sorry for being so late to know :D.
Ever thought you could make some improvements to your RSS feed? Like letting it cover more (or less!) content? Or adding some extra details onto the end of your posts?
All of this is going to take place in the functions.php file of your theme. If your theme doesn’t have one, just create a file in your theme’s folder with that name and let’s get to it! (Make sure all of this code goes between the opening tag in the file)
It detects all ways to access your original WordPress feeds and redirects them to your FeedBurner feed. I enhanced it base on the FeedBurner FeedSmith and now it can redirects feeds for category and tag also.
FeedBurner is a free service that is loaded with options that you do not get with the default WordPress feed. Some of the features include:
- Statistics about your RSS Subscribers so you can analyze and optimize your blog posts.
- Give your users multiple options to subscribe such as Email, and other feed-readers (Netvibes, Google etc).
- Social Proof (Subscriber count)
- Option to customize your feeds such as modify post headings, branding and more.
- Option to ping various feed-reading services once you publish your posts.
- Integrate Google Adsense to monetize your RSS feeds.
- And more…
Just with the short list of features, you can see that it is a must have for all blogs. Now we can move onto setting up the FeedBurner Account.
