Most themes for Blogger and WordPress include an Atom or RSS feed for your blog posts. To make your feed available to subscribers, or to use a feed burning service such as FeedBurner or FeedBlitz, you will first need to find the URL for your theme’s inherent feed.
You may have seen an RSS feed module listed among your widgets or gadgets. It is typically used to import feeds from another site. It does not offer folks a way to subscribe to your feed, which is what is covered here.
To see if your theme includes an RSS feed, open a browser window and type in one of the following URLs of your site. Be sure to change “mysite.com” to the actual domain name for your site. Keep trying each URL type until you find your feed. If your theme already has a feed, you will be redirected to a page displaying it. If you are consistently redirected to a 404 error page stating that no such feed exists, it is likely that your theme does not offer a feed.
- http://www.mysite.com/feed
- http://www.mysite.com/?feed=rss
- http://www.mysite.com/feed/rss2
If your WordPress site is using a static page for your blog posts, or is loaded into the “blog” folder of your hosting space, you may need to add that to the path of the URL to find your feed, like this example.
http://www.mysite.com/blog/feed
If none of the above work, replace “feed” with “atom.xml” as in this URL example:
http://www.mysite.com/atom.xml
If none of the above work, your theme does not offer a feed and you should contact your theme designer.
Once you find your feed URL, copy it to a .doc or .txt file for safe keeping. You will need to create your own feed link or to set up an account with FeedBurner or FeedBlitz.
If your theme does not offer a feed, contact your theme designer.
The default RSS feed supplied by WordPress does not allow you to see metrics (also called statistical analysis, or stats) on your feed subscribers. Nor can they be formatted to deliver your feed to a variety of formats, like mobile devices.
For those reasons, you’ll want to add RSS feeds to your site by using services like FeedBurner and/or by using plugins.
BlogAid offers RSS feed setup and optimization with FeedBurner.
Visit the Services page for details.
