Burn my Feed—Geekoid Accomplishment of the Week or All Roads Lead to Google

After you get your blog going, you're going to want people to read it. I knew the first thing I needed to do was create an "RSS feed," but had no idea what that is or how to go about doing it. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. Basically, it's a way for people to subscribe to your blog like people used to subscribe to the newspaper in the old days. The more subscribers you have, the more attention your blog will receive. As of this moment, I remain the sole subscriber to mine!

When I googled “free rss feed,” I landed at feedburner.com, owned by—you guessed it—google—their tentacles reach into the farthest reaches of the internet. Anyway, you can sign up (you have to get a password first, of course), give them your blog address and it will automatically generate code for a widget that is placed automatically on your Blogger, TypePad, WordPress or MySpace site. You can add the RSS Feed logo, too, so people will recognize it right away. If you look in the lefthand column of this page, you'll see what it looks like. There probably are other sites out there that offer the same service. Pro services like tracking traffic and publicizing your site are available at feedburner.com at extra charge.

To get the RSS feed or email subscription widget installed on your blog follow these steps:

Step 1: go to www.feedburner.com, open an account and have them burn a feed of your blog address.

Step 2: in very tiny print at the top left area of their screen, you'll see a menu with 2 items "My Feeds" and "My Account." Click on My Feeds and you'll see your blog name. Click on that and then go to the Publicize tab.

Step 3: to insert the email subscription code, click on "email subscriptions" in the lefthand nav. Choose the first option, change the drop down menu to match your blog software (mine is blogger and hit go. It will automatically insert the widget onto your blog!

Step 4: to insert the RSS feed, click on "Chicklet Chooser." Select the size icon you'd like to see on your blog, then go to the bottom and change the drop down menu to match your blog software (mine is blogger) and hit go. It will automatically insert the widget on your blog.

That's all there is to it.