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10 Steps to Great RSS Feeds with Joomla

May 17 2007

10 Steps to Great RSS Feeds with Joomla

Thursday, 17 May 2007

RSS Feeds are a great way to build visitor loyalty and to keep them coming back to your site.

They're also good for link building as people keen to keep their sites regularly updated are always looking for good RSS content. The benefit for you is that you get a link back to your site and hopefully some added traffic.

So what's the best way to set up RSS Feeds within Joomla? I'm glad you asked....

10 Simple Steps to Joomla RSS

Go to Run-Digital.com to download their RSS Feed Manager.
Install as a component
Navigate to Components >> RD RSS and click "New".
Select the categories you want to include in your new RSS Feed and name your feed. Click Save .
You'll have a new RSS Feed! The link will look something like this: http://www.alledia.com/index.php?option=com_rd_rss&id=2
Go to Feedburner.com and sign up for an account. The reason for doing this is that Feedburner gives you many additional statistics that you can use to analyze and improve your feed.
Feedburner will give you a new URL for your RSS that will look something like this: http://feeds.feedburner.com/alledia
Improve the setup of your Feedburner account. I'd recommend going into the "Publicize" section of your feed: Activate "Pingshot" and also open "No Index" and check this box: "Indicate that your feed should not be indexed by search engines". This prevents possible duplicate content issues.
You can add your RSS link to the browser bar so that people can easily see a feed is available. Open up your template's index.php and add these lines between the <head> </head> tags: <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="http://your_rss_feed" />
If you have a large site go back to step 1 and repeat with different topics. Especially if you have plenty of fresh content, people will appreciate being able to subscribe to niche subjects.

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Comments (8) Add Comment

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KlipFolio
written by LocaLiceR, May 17, 2007

Another good opportunity for reusing the feeds is to create a KlipFolio klip, I wonder why Joommla webmasters haven't discovered it yet.

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written by Hummerbie, May 21, 2007

Good to see you promote the Feed possibility as well...

Personally I like the DS-Component from www.joomlafun.com better then the Run Digital because you can get full content feeds, including images and proper layout from it!

Feedburner options
You can also use the Feedburner publicize option "Smartfeed" for the best compatibility.
And since a lot of people still want the updates via e-mail you should activate "email subscriptions" on the Publicize tab.

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written by steve, May 21, 2007

Thanks for the great tips Hummerbie! Feedburner really do have a wealth of tools. In fact, the rumor since I blogged this last week is that Feedburner is going to join the great Google Empire and be folded into Google Analytics.

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written by Good Web Practices, November 27, 2007

Seems like you were right Steve! Google have indeed acquired feedburner!

Thanks Steve
written by bernard esterhuyse, December 18, 2007

Thanks Steve, I followed your suggestion, worked like a bomb. Now I just have to get stuck into the stats generated by Feedburner

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written by brandon, March 19, 2008

This aint working for me. It works but it took many times for feedburner to accept the feed. and now when i try to do anything in feedburner i get "connection was reset" or "FeedBurner encountered an error adding your feed to feedburner."

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written by Mike Law, April 17, 2008

I am trying to find an RSS feed manager for Joomla 1.5 but no luck so far. Do you know how to find the URL for the feed for the entire site? There seems to be a front page feed, and a feed for each section and category but I am sure there is one for everything.

A module which showed all available feeds or a component which created a new page listing all feeds would be useful.

Thanks,
Mike.