How to add RSS buttons and code to your blog
How to add RSS buttons and code to your blog?
It seems pretty straight forward you would think. “Just google it” I told myself… well, the answer is no. Actually, I thought I had found a fantastic side explaining how to do so but after 5 minutes of contemplating the explanations, I realised that Lorelle was explaining how to add – within your blog – updated information on other blogs! If you are interested there it is: How to use RSS feeds on your Wordpress site
I do understand what RSS and feeds are. If you don’t, I highly recommend the following 3.43 minute Youtube video by Commoncraft
.
Commoncraft also has another awesome video explaining what on earth are Wikis and how they work:
But translating this knowledge into action is another pair of sleeves as we say in French! See, there are a few things to consider here:
1. You need to access a free news feed management provider such as FeedBurner which is now owned by Google. FeedBurner provides custom RSS feeds and management tools to bloggers, podcasters and other web-based content publishers. Trust me, getting the FeedBurner side of things organized was a piece of cake. What it gives you is your own url that you will integrate in your Wordpress options (using the plugin – read below)
2. Now that I have that custom feed created, what next? I went and got myself a plugin, as you do. I fell for Chicklet Creator Wordpress Plugin as it dealt with both giving me buttons and generating the code to link these buttons to my custom feed from feedburner. Very easy to install, just follow the instructions and remember that if your icons to not appear once you have activated the plugin, it is because your FTP client has not uploaded the subfolder with their images!
3. last but not least, I now have the buttons, and the code, but they are not IN my blog! Where do I physically copy and paste the code in the css code??? This one was pretty tough, especially as the css lingo still sounds like Korean to me. Let me run you through how I tackled that issue: I did a view source on my blog homepage and searched for titles that I then searched for in the css stylesheet. Then, I inserted the code that the Chicklet Creator plugin provided me with right there. And it works! My buttons (or Chicklets as I am meant to call them) now appear on the left, simply because I am yet to find where in my fantastic 3k2 theme is the code for the right column!
Et voila, it only took me about a week to get this done, but hopefully this post will help people that are in the same situation as me! Please share your thoughts and / or comments and I will update this post accordingly to make it more accurate!
