Do you syndicate your blogs? I do!
You may be familiar with the term syndication from the world of newspapers. When a column or cartoon is syndicated, it appears in many news outlets rather than one. Syndication does have an application when it comes to blogs. The XML markup formats RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and Atom are, in fact, used to create feeds of a blog’s contents.
The feed can then be sent to software called a feed reader, which enables someone to read new blog postings as they appear without having to manually connect to the blog over and over. Someone who uses a feed reader to pick up the syndicated version of a blog is said to have subscribed to that blog.
Blogger has the ability to syndicate your blogs as well using the Atom format. If you activate Atom syndication for your blog, you tell Blogger to create a version of your publication that can be read by feed readers. Follow these steps:
- Go to your Blogger Dashboard page and click the Settings link next to the name of your blog.
- Click the Site Feed link.
- Choose Full from the ‘‘Allow Blog Feeds’’ drop-down list.
- If you want the full content of your posts to be published, or select Short if you want only the first paragraph or so to go to the feed. In general, it makes sense to include the full content unless your posts are lengthy and tend to be updated several times a day. If you flood your blog with lots of content, choose Short to give your subscribers a quick summary they’ll find easy to digest.
- Click Save Settings.
When you create a feed of your blog, you are assigned a URL for it. Chances are it takes the form of your blog’s URL with /atom.xml attached to it. If you create a new blog with Blogger and you enable site feeds, you don’t actually have to worry about adding such links; they appear in the blog automatically.
If you created a blog a while ago before the automatic feed feature was added, you need to annually create a link to this feed in the body of your blog so interested readers can subscribe to it more easily. Adding such a link requires you to add a line of HTML code to your site’s template.
Blogging is a user-friendly way to create content for a Web site on a daily basis and with a minimum of fuss. The problem is coming up with something to say on a regular basis and finding the time to enter new blog entries. Google can help here, too: it can’t tell you what to think or say, exactly, but it can provide you with news items and ready-made bits of content that you can add to your Web site to enrich your existing content.