Section 11. Enabling and Publishing Site Feeds

11. Enabling and Publishing Site Feeds

BEFORE YOU BEGIN

4 Logging In to Blogger and Navigating the Dashboard

SEE ALSO

49 Providing an External RSS Feed

50 Using an RSS Aggregator

Using web syndication technologies, more and more people actually read blogs through a feed reader rather than a web browser. These XML-formatted data streams are primarily used for news aggregation and content indexing. Blogger enables all users with the ability to provide an Atom feed for their blogs.

To begin, log in to Blogger and click the Change Settings icon in the Blogs section of the Blogger Dashboard.

1.	Click the Settings Tab The Blogger user interface includes four top-level tabs. Click the Settings tab to display links to the numerous configurable options. The Basic link will be preselected for you, so click the Site Feed link to access the feed-related settings.
2.	Enable or Disable Site Feed Select Yes or No from the Publish Site Feed drop-down list. If Yes is selected, Blogger will publish an Atom feed for your blog. If No is selected, no feed will be provided. Site feeds are highly recommended for all blogs. 11. Enabling and Publishing Site Feeds
3.	Configure Content Descriptions Atom feeds may contain the entire text of your blog post or simply the first paragraph. Full-text descriptions are recommended unless you are specifically trying to drive traffic to your website as opposed to simply having blog readers. Readers who want to comment on the content they read via your feed will still click through to your site to do so. To enable full-text descriptions, select Full from the Descriptions drop-down list. Otherwise, select Short from the Descriptions drop-down list.
4.	Locate Your Feed URL If an Atom feed has been enabled, the URL will be displayed in the Site Feed URL field. Use this URL for reference whenever you need to make a link to your site feed.
5.	Insert an Article Footer The Article Footer field is specifically for bloggers who have registered for the AdSense for Feeds service offered by Google. In addition to being a registered user of AdSense and placing the appropriate code in this field, you must also enable full-text descriptions and post pages. WEB RESOURCE http://www.google.com/adsense/ Learn more about the Google AdSense program, and register if you like what you see. After you register, you will have access to the code to paste in the Article Footer field referenced here.
6.	Save Your Settings To save the changes made on the Site Feed settings screen, click the Save Settings button. You will see an onscreen confirmation when the settings are saved, and at that point you must click the Republish button to initiate the publishing sequence. When the publishing sequence displays its notice of completion, you can navigate away from the Blogger user interface and view your blog or work with other settings.