Did you know that you can have your blog’s headlines appear in a group even if your blog is not an Author Buzz UK blog? In this tutorial, I am going to show you how.
If you have an Author Buzz blog, the posts should already be appearing in your group. We do that for you so you can skip this tutorial. If they are not showing up, post a help request in the help and support group.
What is an RSS feed?
RSS and its younger sibling, ATOM, are XML formatted versions of your blog. While still kind of human readable, this structured feed enables computers, feed readers, and so forth to understand which parts of the post are for what. In our case, where the headline is, which picture to show, and where to link it so people can read the post.
Feeds are as common to blogs as comments are. They are often used to read posts without going to the website. If your email client or mobile has the right app, you can subscribe to a blog to get the posts as they appear. That subscription is powered by your RSS feed.
You are going to need to use the feed to integrate your blog with your Author Buzz group.
How to find your feed?
There are a few ways to find your feed. I will cover some of the basics for a few platforms and then show you a fallback that almost always works. If you already know how then you can skip to the “adding feeds to a group” if you wish.
Before you go digging arround, check your sidebar and page footer for something that looks like this. This logo is the RSS icon and probably links to your feed.
Your feed on Blogger.com
For this example, I will be using the blog bookreviewsandjal.blogspot.com which I was most recently looking at. The principle is the same for all blogspot blogs. Your feed is found at /feeds/posts/default?alt=rss – which is the RSS version of the feed. Put that all together and we get:
http://bookreviewsandjal.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss
Replace “bookreviewsandjal” with your subdomain and that’s your RSS feed URL.
Your WordPress RSS feed
On WordPress, your feed is usually located at /feed/ – simples. So for Author Buzz our feed is:
https://authorbuzz.co.uk/feed/
Replace out domain with yours and that is your feed. This works for wordpress.com as well as self-hosted WordPress blogs.
Your Tumblr RSS feed.
Your Tumblr blog has an RSS feed too. It is found at /rss on the themed view of your blog. For us, that is authorbuzzuk.tumblr.com – yes we have a Tumblr account too.
So for our RSS feed, you would put it together to get:
https://authorbuzzuk.tumblr.com/rss
Replace “authorbuzzuk” with your tumblr username or blog name.
How to find the RSS feed of any site at all
By now you will have realised that your feed is just a link URL. The secret of the link URL for your feed is actually sent with every page. It is just hidden in the HTML.
This is how you find it.
First, go to your site or wherever you want the RSS feed for. Then you need to “view source”. On Chrome this is Tools > View Source or right click and select “View Source”. On most browsers “Ctrl+U” does the trick too. Similar options exist for other browsers – here is a guide.
What you should now see is a jumble of text. That’s the HTML that makes the page. The first part of this is called the “head”. This is because it sits between to head tags.
We are going to have to search the text to find a “link” tag of type “application/rss+xml”. It will look something like one of these.
If there is more than one, they will probably be labelled. WordPress users will notice that comments get their own feed too. Blogspot users will notice ATOM feeds. If you do find more than one, make sure you pick the RSS feed and not something else. If in doubt, the forums are a good place to ask for help.
The part you are after is in the href tag. In the image, you will see the part of the HTML where the RSS feed link is for each of the three examples I just mentioned. If you click that link you will see the RSS itself. Copy the RSS feed URL and you are ready to add it to your group.
Still can’t find your RSS feed?
Some blog themes might have left out the RSS feed. Other might not have one. There is a chance though, that if you are using something obscure that it does not support RSS. You can try asking for help in the forums – someone might have an idea where it is hiding (if it exists). Be sure to give our helpful community as much relevant information as you can.
Adding feeds to a group
For this, we are going to start on the groups’ page. From here you are either going to make a new group (if you do not have one) or go and find your group and enter it, select “Manage” and then “External Blogs”. From here on, the process is exactly the same.
You should now be faced with something that looks like this:
You will see in my screenshot I already added a feed. This is from the Copy Blogger Fans group. Where, unsurprisingly, we want to see the headlines from Copyblogger.
There is no limit to the number of feeds you can have updating your group with nicely formatted links. Just use a new line for each one.
Press “Update Feed URL’s” and the latest posts will be added as activity items in your group. If your group has not seen many visitors then it might not always update – active groups work best. For less active groups, you can come back and press “Update Feed URL’s” to force it to update your group.
That’s all it takes
Find the RSS link, add it to your group, update, and done. Now your group will report new posts as activity items in your group. All your group’s members will see your headlines in their activity feed. It should also show up in the general activity feed too.
If you opted to have an Author Buzz blog for the group, you do not need to do this. Author Buzz blogs automatically update their group.
Now you should have all the skills necessary to turn your blog into something Author Buzz users can subscribe to. Happy blogging.
Before you go, I have one small favour to ask. If this post was useful to you would you please share it with others. Knowing that this blog is helping people would be a huge encouragement to me as a writer.