Posts Tagged ‘RSS’
March 17th, 2010 | 
Author: Yesterday I showed you how to set up your RSS feed in Feedburner. Once you have done this, you really want visitors to your blog to go through Feedburner so it’s captured and your statistics are more acurate. If you have WordPress, you can use a simple plugin to direct visitors through that avenue. From the Plugins section in your admin panel, click on Add New. Do a quick search and type in Feedburner. FD Feedburner Plugin is the one that I use. Click on the Install link on the right side. Install the plugin and then make sure to Activate it.
Once installed and activated, go back to the Plugins folder and click on Feedburner Configuration. Enter in the feed url that you created yesterday.
From the plugin, here is more information about how it works. Pretty simple!
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Yesterday we showed you how to create your own Gravatar avatar! If you have your own WordPress Blog and want to activate the ability to show avatars in the comments section, here is how you do it.
Log into the Admin panel, then scroll down to the Settings section on the left side. From there, click on Discussion.
Scroll all the way down to the Avatar section. First you need to actually opt to Show Avatars. Without this, no images will ever be shown. Determine the maximum rating of Avatar that you will allow to be shown on your blog. Finally, select a default avatar that will be used for those people that don’t have their own Avatar set up already. Save the changes and you are done! Pretty simple right?
LinkedIn is a great site that allows for networking, building and strengthening relationships. Setting up a basic profile is free. Formed in 2003, there are over 60 million members, so certainly a site to be on! Along with finding contacts, and making new ones, don’t miss out on the ability to display your blog posts on your profile. Doing this also means they will display on the Home page of all other people you are contacted to. Here is how to achieve this.
Log into your profile. Go to Profile and then Edit My Profile. At the top section, go to Websites. Click on Edit.
From here, you can add up to 3 websites. Select either My RSS Feed, or My Blog. Enter in your blog url if selected, or your rss feed link, then click on Save Changes.
Next, scroll down on the Edit Profile screen till you see Applications. Then click on Add Application to the right.
From the list of applications, select Blog Link by clicking on the name of the app.
Next, click on the link to add the application to your profile. You can determine if you want it displayed on your Profile and the home page, or just one or the other.
Finally, go back to the Home page. You will see the Blog Link application. There are two tabs. One that states By Me, for your own blog posts, and one From My Contacts which shows blogs from others who also have an RSS feed being pulled into LinkedIn. 
What other websites have you found to pull your RSS feed into? Share those places below!
So, back in January I did a post about using Twitterfeed to import your blog posts (RSS Feed) into Twitter and Facebook. Although I am not TOTALLY going back on my word, I have found that it doesn’t seem to work so well for Facebook. Works great for Twitter though, so still using it for that. However, I found that at times it would log me out of my Facebook account and lose connection. It could be because I have three Facebook accounts that I am constantly logging in and out of? Also, it would only update either my Profile or my Page, not both. So, I had to search for something else. (not sure what an RSS Feed is? Check out this blog post to learn more).
Social RSS seems to be doing the trick for me. Log into Facebook and then click on the following link: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=23798139265
It will take you directly to the application for Social RSS for Facebook. This application allows you to pull in your blog feed directly into Facebook. If you are using WordPress, there are several plugins that will do this for you, but I haven’t yet found one that has the same settings and flexibility of this app.
Once at the application, you will need to put in the settings. First, you can enter in a Description. Put in a little bit about you or your business. This is going to be used on your Facebook Profile, not your Page (more about how to set that up in a moment). Let people know about what it is that you do, or what your RSS feed is about. Why would it interest me? Who is it targeted at?
Next you can put in a website link. You can make this your home page if you wanted to. You will put the actual RSS Feed link further on down in the settings. Now onto the settings for the feed itself. If you need more guidance just hover your mouse over the title of the field and it will give you more info. These are all required fields and the tag can be something simple. The field is no more than 5 characters so just put in a combination of letters and numbers that makes sense to you and what the feed is about. This is really more critical if you have more than one feed. I just used an acronym of my business name, seemed simple enough!
The Title I just used my company name. When a new post is published to your wall, it states: New Story from, then the Title you entered, so put in something that makes sense. The URL is that of your RSS feed. If you are not sure what it is, click on the orange rss icon from your blog and it should take you to the url. If you are still not sure, ask a friendly web designer, I am sure they will tell you for free!!! 
Do not just use the url of a regular web page, it won’t work that way. The Alternative URL will be used when someone clicks on the Title of the feed. I have it taking people to my About page for more information.
Next click the Display Options tab.This allows for more settings to determine how the new posts from the RSS feed will look. Here are my settings below, feel free to copy, or use your own. You can click on the other two tabs but I haven’t changed anything on those. Finally, click on Add to Profile.
This will ask you if you want to add Social RSS to your Profile. You can add it to the boxes tab, or the Wall and Info Tab.
Once you have done this, click on Application settings from the top right of Facebook. Click to Edit the Social RSS Settings. Select your Profile settings, and also click on the Bookmark tab. By Bookmarking Social RSS, this means it will show up when you are on the Facebook home page. You will see it listed underneath News Feed, Messages and any Applications you have book marked. This makes it easier to get back to in the future.
Once you have this all configured, the next time you publish a blog post, you will see it listed on your Profile. Below is how mine looks.
And finally, if you want it to appear on your Facebook Fan Page, click on this link: http://apps.facebook.com/rss-connect/pageinfo.php?ref=tb If you have more than one page, it will ask you which one to add it to. Click to Add Social RSS and then you will be taken to the same settings page as before. It’s a pain to set it up twice, but you only need to through this once, and that’s it. I kept two windows open, one with my Profile settings and one for my Page and just copied and pasted from one to the other.
Had success with any other applications posting your RSS Feed to Facebook? Let us know about them below!
Here are some great blogs to start reading from some Purple Star Consulting clients. You can simply subscribe to their RSS feed for notifications, or just visit them every so often.
Star Team Atlanta – Rodney Camren
Rodney is a Realtor in Lawrenceville, Georgia and the Greater Atlanta area. He also does relocation and is an extremely active member of the community. Look for Rodney to do even greater things in 2010!
Best Fit Pet Sit – Valerie Pegg
Best Fit Pet Sit is a pet sitting service. Along with being a fantastic dog walker (and one Purple Star trusts with our own pets), Valerie has also done amazing things with her site. Giving her the tools for success, she understands the importance of keywords, titles and headers. Proof? Type Pet Sitter in Gwinnett into Google, she comes up number 1!
Georgia Trolley Services – Jerry Moore
Jerry owns two trollies. A trolley is a unique form of transportation for your special event. While most trolleys are modern in terms of amenities, their style speaks of yesteryear. His posts are unique and entertaining! His service is a great alternative for wedding transportation.
Baby Steps Online – Laura and Melissa
This blog is mentioned in the article about WordPress in our December newsletter. Laura is web savvy and worked on their main website, but just needed a bit of help with the coding of WordPress to add in the blog. Baby Steps provides classes and information about child birth and all things baby!
Sparkle – Meg Earhart
This is a brand new blog and can’t wait to see her articles once she gets started! Meg owns Sparkle! in downtown Lawrenceville. Go ahead and subscribe so you can start reading when she is ready to blog!
