Sharing Feeds in Your Blog
Months ago, somebody asked me how do I display the latest posts of the people in my reading list. During that time, I was using Google Reader’s feature to put them here in my site. Personally, I don’t like it because it’s customizing options are limited. What’s more, it’s not XHTML valid (I’m not sure though if this was already solved).
I tried looking for a plugin to do this, but to no avail, I did not succeed. The plugins that I tried were not the plugins that I was looking for.
And now, I have finally found the solution. Yes, I’m sharing it to you.
So what you do now is to subscribe to the feeds that you want in Google Reader (but that does not mean that we will use Google Reader to republish your feed to HTML). Make sure all the feeds that you want to share are tagged with a common tag. After doing so, click “Options” (in Google Reader), go to the “Tags” section. Share that tag that you want to share. From there, you can click the “add a clip to your site” to start sharing the feeds that you’ve selected. As what I’ve said, its customizing options are limited. So read on.
Now,click “email a link,” you’ll find there the URL of the feed of that particular tag. It compiles all the feeds that you specified and it publishes all the posts in a single feed. It’s being published in Atom.
If you’re using WordPress and have the plugin Widgets installed, you can log to your WP admin panel. From the “Presentation” tab, select “Sidebar Widgets” and change the settings of a RSS widget, you can put there the title of the feed, the URL of the feed and how many entries it will display. Word of caution: it will render wrong URLs for the posts. I don’t know if this is a bug in WP. Besides, the feed that Google Reader provides is Atom, not RSS, right? Don’t worry, there is a solution to this.
(I don’t know if there is a site out there that do something like Google Reader but publishes the feed directly in RSS. Technorati does this, but it’s not reliable.)
FeedBurner can convert the format of your feed, so use it. Burn the Atom feed (the one Google Reader has provided) in FeedBurner. Once done, go to the “Optimize” section of the settings of the feed, disable “SmartFeed”. After that, select “Convert Format Burner,” from the drop-list, choose “RSS 2.0″ and activate it.
Luckily, FeedBurner also has the feature like that of Google Reader that republish your feed back to HTML, and hey, it has more customizing options. It also render correct and valid XHTML. The catch: there is this annoying banner of FeedBurner (this is true for free accounts, I’m not sure with the paid accounts). And I know, you don’t like that. This feature of FeedBurner is called as “BuzzBoost” and you can find it at the “Publicize” tab.
For WP users that has the plugin “Widgets” installed, you can prevent the banner from displaying by going to the “Sidebar Widgets” (in your WP admin panel) and supply there the URL feed of the feed that you created in FeedBurner.
If the URLs don’t work (and you think you followed everything in this post correctly), just wait for a few moments and the URL will be corrected.
I hope this has helped you. If you’re looking for the finish product, you can find it in my sidebar (the one with the RSS icon). Sorry for those people who don’t understand this (talking about the newbies).
