Tag Archive for 'RSS'

RSS feed problems

Published
by
Chalupa
on June 3, 2008
in Add-Ons and Plug-Ins and Administration and Organization
. 0 Comments

This post isn’t so much a tip, trick, or idea, but a call for help. I was using PodPress for a short while on my personal movie blog and it did some funny things to the RSS feed. The one thing I was most unhappy with was it changed the author on every post to something default and not of my choosing. After uninstalling the plugin and upgrading Wordpress to 2.5.1, my feed still looks like it did when PodPress was installed. Does anybody have any ideas on how to fix this? I thought upgrading Wordpress would have fixed that, but maybe it’s something in the database.

The reason I want the author field fixed in the feed is because it’s a multi-author blog and people deserve credit for their stuff. Also, I don’t like what it automatically put in there on its own.

blog - http://branfeld.com/movies

forum post on wordpress.org

FeedForAll

Published
by
Chalupa
on May 1, 2008
in Other Software for Bloggers
. 0 Comments

Last week I talked about an RSS generator called Podcast RSS Buddy.  I said it wasn’t exactly working out for me and today I’m going to talk about one that is.  Normally I try to find things that are free, but sometimes you literally get what you pay for.  Podcast RSS Buddy wasn’t free and FeedForAll isn’t free either; in fact, it costs a little more.  The bonus is that FeedForAll gives you a 30 day trial, it’s much more sophisticated, and is a much better program for long term use.

I’ve decided to list some features instead of talking at length about them.  This program is easy to use for both beginner and advance users.  I highly suggest you check it out.

  • Easy to use interface
  • Create and manage unlimited feeds
  • Manage, modify, and re-order feed items
  • Validate your feed
  • Multiple extensions (iTunes, Dublin Core, etc) available
  • Spell check
  • Creation wizard
  • Publishing options
  • Export to HTML, CSV, or text
  • Search and Replace
  • Load and manage/modify pre-existing feeds
  • Automatic date management
  • Automatic feed repair
  • Mac version available

Podcast RSS Buddy

Published
by
Chalupa
on April 21, 2008
in Other Software for Bloggers
. 1 Comment

In my last post I talked about podcasting and I figured I’d continue. RSS feeds are something that are important to me. If you’re creating content for the internet, having an RSS feed that has accurate, up-to-date information, and is something you’re comfortable with is very important. You might remember the main reason I didn’t like podPress is because of what it did to my RSS feed.

Since I have a Joomla installation for my podcast website, I needed something to create an RSS feed for iTunes. A co-worker of mine suggested Podcast RSS Buddy. This is a cheap, somewhat easy to use program that includes five free uses, then it costs about $20 to purchase a license. This program is made for iTunes so it has the proper fields all ready for you to fill in. Having this feature is one step up from just using the auto-generated feed from your blog.

I used this tool for almost 15 months until I decided it was time to move on to something more complicated. If you’re not very tech savvy, this is a program I think would work well for you. I like to tweak things and sometimes start all over and rebuild something I’ve created. This is where I ran into some problems.

When I formatted my computer and re-installed the software, everything worked fine until I tried to import my feed. When I imported the feed, that Podcast RSS Buddy made, it couldn’t find several of my items, put several items out of order, and some of the data wasn’t correct. There also appears to be no way to re-order items within the feed. Another problem I ran into was that changing or updating the podcast information would sometimes make some of my episodes disappear. After I fixed the missing episodes, my updated podcast information would be gone. To be fair, the program is still a work in progress so there are some bugs to still be worked out.

Pros:

  • Easy to use
  • Built-in fields for iTunes
  • Cheap (with 5 free uses)

Cons:

  • Data doesn’t transfer well between machines
  • Import function does not always work
  • Some bugs still present in software

If you’re wanting to just try something, I would suggest giving this program a whirl. You get five free uses. If you’re planning to be creating a podcast feed long-term, I would suggest maybe looking for another program to fit your needs.

PodPress review

Published
by
Chalupa
on April 14, 2008
in Add-Ons and Plug-Ins
. 3 Comments

For those of you out there podcasting, there sure are a lot of available tools. One easy and free way to get this done is with a blog. Links to audio files can be placed inside of your posts and the automatic RSS creation for the blog itself can serve as your podcast feed. This is a really simple way to do it. There are also some plugins and other tools you can use to do this - one of them being podPress.

I have one real podcast, Lebowski Podcast, and one sorta-podcast, Chalupa’s Movies. The first is being hosted on a CMS and the other is just my movie review blog with a few audio reviews popped in there. I installed podPress a few months ago to see how I liked it and this is what I found.

Pros

  • Inserts a player into your blog entry
  • Stats for the feed, streaming, and downloads
  • Settings for iTunes and other podcast directories
  • Customizable feed options
  • Customizable player options

Cons

  • Takes over your RSS feed completely
  • Makes changes to your feed that you can’t specify or change
  • Only one author on all posts (My movie blog has several contributors and they aren’t being credited in the feed now)
  • Annoying default image on your feed unless you have something to change it to
  • Inserts backslashes in front of all special characters that actually show up on the web and looks tacky

Even though there are some nice features to podPress, I don’t think it’s working out for me and my movie blog. I have plans of uninstalling it soon. Even though the player and statistics are nice, the changes being made to my RSS feed are just unacceptable. If any of you know of a good plugin for podcasting, let us know and we’ll try to check it out.

FeedBurner Part 1: Setup and Analyze your feed

Published
by
Chalupa
on February 18, 2008
in Getting Started
. 0 Comments

In my first post, I installed Wordpress, now what?, I mentioned FeedBurner as a good tool for RSS feeds. I haven’t used other RSS tools for Wordpress so let us know if you have any other suggestions. Besides being able to see statistics on your feed, FeedBurner also has some other nice features that are broken up into four categories: Analyze, Optimize, Monetize, and Publicize. As you can see by the post title, I’m going to be talking about the Analyze tab today.

For starters, setting up your feed is easy. First you’ll need to know the address for your auto-generated feed. Wordpress creates two: one for your posts and another for your comments. If I were you, I’d setup both because it’s not that hard and this way everything will be consistent. On your blog there should be links to your feeds. You can click on them to get the address or right-click and copy the address. Now that you have the address you can setup the feed at FeedBurner.com. On the homepage there’s an area to paste/type in the address for your feed. From here you hit the Next button and you’ll have a few more options. I’m not going to write about those because FeedBurner has excellent help for that kind of stuff. After you have things setup for your post feed you can then repeat for your comment feed.

Next time you’ll login to FeedBurner you’ll have a dashboard, called My Feeds, with your two new feeds showing up. Click on one of them and you’ll be under the Analyze tab. This is where you can view all of your statistics. You can view stats on your Feed, Site and Headline Animators. For your feed you can track item views, item link clicks, and item enclosure downloads. The last one is mostly for podcast episodes, which we’ll eventually get to. The feed stats are already setup, but it’ll take a little extra work for site stats, and headline animators can be configured under the Publicize tab.

Your feed stats will track subscribers, hits, item uses, and uncommon uses. A subscriber is defined as somebody checking your feed through a feed reader on a given day. If you have 20 subscribers on Monday and 15 on Tuesday, this doesn’t mean you have 35 total. This just means 20 people checked it on Monday and on Tuesday some of them had their computers off, didn’t open their reader, etc. You can look at your stats by yesterday, past 7 days, past 30 days and all time. You do get to see trends over time, but you’re not able to look at specific day more than a month back. This is a drawback, but hey, you’re using a free service.

If you already have a statistics tool setup or are going to set one up, you might not want to use FeedBurner’s service. You almost always get conflicting numbers for hits, unique hits, etc. This has to do with time zones and the different algorithms and criteria the software is programed to use. It can get confusing trying to work off of two different statistics tools.

After you look through some of the initial options and make your choices, you should start seeing some stats in the next day or two, if people are subscribed. One last thing you need to do to make sure people are using your FeedBurner feed and not your old feed. You could go to all the trouble of tracking down those links in your template, or you could use the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin.

FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin

Published
by
Chalupa
on February 18, 2008
in Administration and Organization and Other Software for Bloggers
. 1 Comment

If you’re using FeedBurner for your feeds, and I highly recommend you do, you can easily re-direct your feed links from your self-hosted Wordpress blog to Feedburner using the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin. Yeah, so that’s a mouthful. After you download, upload, and activate this plugin there are just a few things left to do.

1.) You’ll need to already have your FeedBurner account setup. You could do this afterwards, but you’ll need this information for configuration.

2.) If you’d like FeedBurner to handle the feeds for both your posts/entries and your comments, you’ll need to setup two feeds - one for each.

3.) Go to your Options menu in Wordpress and there should be a submenu called FeedBurner. This is where you’ll enter your feed new FeedBurner feed URLs you just created.

4.) Last step is to test this out. Most templates/themes have links on them somewhere for your built-in RSS feeds. Test them out. If they don’t work I’d suggest trying them in ten minutes. If they still don’t work go back and check your spelling. That’s usually my most common mistake.

Well that pretty much covers setting up this plugin. There will be more posts in the near future describing some of the features you’ll find useful, or may want to check out, in FeedBurner.

I installed Wordpress, now what?

Published
by
Chalupa
on February 12, 2008
in Getting Started
. 2 Comments

So you’ve bought a domain name, installed your Wordpress blog, and now you’re wondering what to do. Well, look no further because I’m about to tell you the things you should be thinking about.

Whenever I play around with technology I usually do a little research, play around with it, and then jump in headfirst. Over the past few years of blogging, there are a few things I’ve learned that would have been better being setup from the very beginning.

#1 Statistics
“What’s that?” you say. “Stats? I hated that class!” Well, you won’t have to get out your calculator or calculate any r values. What we’re talking about here is finding out if people are coming to your blog, what posts are popular, what are people searching for to find your blog, what links were clicked to get to your blog, etc, etc.

Feeling a little bit better about this topic? I thought you would. I have tried out about 5-10 different stats packages, that are free, for blogging. They have all been a little bit different and offer some different types of information. One thing to point out is if you have multiple stats packages installed, you’re probably going to get different numbers for the amount of hits (both total and unique), referring links, time on site, etc. The reason for this is because it depends on how long it waits before counting a hit from the same IP as another unique hit. It also depends on the timezone it’s working off of, and many other technicalities. This is why I would suggest only using only one to avoid confusion.

One reason to set up your statistics immediately is that every day that goes by without a tool installed is another day you have no idea what kind of traffic your blog is seeing. I’m currently using Google Analytics and am really enjoying it. The biggest advantage to using this free tool is that you’re not limited to only seeing the most X recent hits. Most of the other free tools I’ve used have only allowed me to see the last 100 or 200 hits. This is great, but it cripples you from seeing any trends over time. The only thing I miss about Google Analytics is that even though I’m able to see a lot of different types of information, they aren’t sorted by specific hits. I can’t see that a particular person came to my site from a referring link, went to 8 pages, spent 3min on my site and then left. So you might want to consider what types of information you’re wanting to receive and how they’re sorted before picking a certain stats tool.

#2 RSS Feed
If you’re not familiar with what an RSS feed is, then you should look it up on Wikipedia or something. These aren’t so much the wave of the future, but the wave of the now. Almost every blog and website you go to will offer some type or types of RSS feeds to their users. These are then setup on RSS readers so somebody can see if new content has been posted without having to go visit their favorite site(s). This may not sound like a big deal if you check one or two sites a day, however, if 35 of your friends are infrequent bloggers and you’d like to keep up with all their blogs…that’s when an RSS reader starts to sound like a good idea.

Wordpress has automatic RSS generation features built right into it. The only drawback is you don’t get to choose how it looks or what’s included, you can’t see stats on who’s subscribed, etc. A good, free tool I’ve been using for all of my feeds is FeedBurner. FeedBurner was recently bought by Google so I don’t think there’s any danger of it disappearing any time soon. With this service you can add bells and whistles to your feed, customize it for podcasts, modify description and title, see how many people are subscribed, etc. There’s a lot of cool functionality which I will be discussing in a later post. There are also some very handy plugins that allow you to redirect your built-in Wordpress feed to use FeedBurner, which I will also be talking about in a later post.

#3 Ads
Advertisements are something I just started using and wish I had setup a long time ago. Some of my friends stay away from them because they see it as “whoring themselves out” or something that will “clutter up their site.’”This can very easily happen and is something to consider if and when choosing an ad service. I’ve been using Google Adsense for a few months now and highly recommend it. You’re able to choose the type, style and size of your ads. You’re able to blacklist specific ads from showing up. Most importantly, you’re also able to maybe make some money which could cover your domain name costs and maybe even your hosting costs.

#4 Spam
Spam is something I’m sure you seen in your mailbox. If you’re new to blogging, then you may not know that you can also get spam comments. Just like there are spam filters for mail, there are also spam filters for blog comments. Wordpress has some settings to help prevent this under Options…Discussion. You can prevent comments from showing immediately, blacklist people and even hold comments if they have too many links in them. This doesn’t always catch everything though.

One built-in plugin you’ll find is called Akismet. This is a pretty decent service that will try to catch some spam. The only catch is you have to have an API key to use it. You can easily get one of these free by creating an account at Wordpress.com. The only thing I don’t like about Akismet, and this might just be ignorance on my part, is that I’m not notified in any way if some suspected comments are being held for my approval. I have to login to my blog and check my Comments tab.

There are also many other free spam plugins you can check out and try. Always check out some of the specifications before you pick one. You’ll want to make sure you can manually “ok” a comment if it’s suspected of spam and that you’re able to manage the spam blocker/catcher in some way.

#5 Organization
I’m sure all of you have gotten tired of somebody telling you to clean up your room at some point in time. This is one of those things that may seem pointless to you and important to someone else at the exact same time. In the case of your blog, it’s good to consider your readers on this one because they’re the ones reading. If you’re creating a personal blog and don’t want anyone to read it, then maybe you can skip some organization. I would still recommend some categorizing or tagging of your posts regardless of what kind of readership you’re expecting.

There are two ways to organize your posts: categories and tags. The general rule of thumb is to use categorize for big and broad things and tags for more specific things. Both categories and tags make posts easier to find for you and your readers. It allows people to find more posts on similar topics or maybe continue reading the saga of a long and drawn-out story. The hard part is always deciding on your organization scheme. If you can figure this out beforehand, it’s usually less work. If you need to change things up later on, the amount of work really depends on how many posts you have to edit.

Another step in this organization process is to setup a plugin and/or widget to display your categories/tags for people to go directly to them. There are some built-in widgets to display categories and tags, but you might want to look for something specific once you start having a large amount of posts of varying types.

Wrapping it up
This pretty much covers what I consider to be the essentials. There are many, many other plugins and add-ons out there just begging you to play with them. Your template/theme is an aspect I didn’t mention. One reason is you can easily use one of the provided themes to get started. Another reason is this isn’t my area of expertise. Tara will be giving some advice and tips about these in the near future. If you have any questions or comments let us know.