What's a feed and why would I want one?

A feed is, simply, another way for people to read your blog posts that doesn't require them to actually visit your site to do so. If you read a lot of blogs and news sites, clicking through to all of the websites to see if there's anything new can get tedious. Feeds allow your readers to "subscribe" to your blog: that is, add your feed to a feed reader - software that will automatically notify them when you've published a new post, and allow them to read it without even having to click to visit your site.

What Is RSS.com explains more about how this works.

But I want people to visit my site!

When you publish your RSS feed, you have the choice to show whole posts, or just a teaser: a shortened version of the whole thing. The setting can be changed for WordPress in Settings > Reading.

There's been a lot of debate in recent years about whether it's better to publish full or partial feeds. People who argue for partial feeds say that they'd rather have people come to their site to read their posts (and click their advertising while they're there): a feed is, for them, a notification system that says "come to my site, there's something new", rather than handing over the content to be read whenever their readers choose. They also say that full feeds make it easy for other people to steal their words and republish them on spam blogs.

I say that both of these arguments are trumped by the fact that partial feeds are really annoying. *You* might prefer me to come look at your advertising; *I* prefer to read your posts in my feedreader at my convenience. And that way, I'm actually more likely to read what you've said; if I have to click to read more, the first part of your post had better be a really compelling bit of writing, otherwise I'm just going to move onto the next blog.

If you want advertising, there are plenty of ways to advertise on your RSS feed - Google has Adsense for Feeds, and there are WordPress plugins to add banner ads to your feeds too.

If you're undecided whether you want to offer full or partial feeds, you can always offer both: the Dual Feeds plugin will automate this. On TameBay we publish a full feed with "all rights reserved" - just for personal reading use - and a partial feed with a Creative Commons licence that anyone can republish, because they'll be linking back to us.

[This issue of blog content theft is a much bigger one than this post has room for. I'll be revisiting it at a later date, but if you're having problems with people taking your words as their own, I'd recommend a visit to the excellent Plagiarism Today.]

Default feeds and where to find them

The orange logo above has become the standard for feeds. Most themes will include some variant of it as a link to your feed, allowing your readers to find it and subscribe easily. If that's not the case, don't panic: WordPress automatically generates feeds for you, so all you have to do is link them.

If you've set up pretty permalinks for your blog, the main feed for your posts will be at
http://domain.com/feed/

If for some reason you haven't or can't set up pretty permalinks, then you can provide your readers with direct links to one of several flavours of feeds WordPress generates: RSS2 is the WP default, and either of its possible URLs should work fine in any up-to-date feedreader:

http://domain.com/wp-rss2.php

http://domain.com/?feed=rss2

If you prefer Atom 1.0, then go for one of

http://domain.com/wp-atom.php

http://domain.com/?feed=atom

You can generate these automatically with the following PHP code (especially useful if your domain name might change or you're making a theme for publishing):

<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>
<?php bloginfo('atom_url'); ?>

Who's reading my feed?

One of the problems in the early days of RSS (and one big argument used by proponants of partial feeds) was that it was difficult to tell just how many people were reading your feed. That's changed, thanks to a lovely company called Feedburner, which is now owned by Google.

Feedburner allows you to redirect your feed through their servers, where number of subscribers and all sorts of other data can be monitored. They also reproduce your feed as an email subscription option for readers who'd rather have your blog emailed to them. The service is free, and absolutely invaluable.

To get started, install the Feedburner Feedsmith plugin (can be downloaded from Google and uploaded via FTP, or just installed automatically through the WordPress plugins admin section).

Coming tomorrow: posts are not the only feed. WordPress offers many more feeds, from comments to individual tags, categories and authors. If you're not already, why not subscribe to my feed ready for the next post.

Tags: advertising, Atom, Feedburner, feeds, Google, permalinks, RSS

Posted by Sue on May 2, 2009 in NPG2WP, WordPress.