Rob Williams - Orangejack

Welcome back class. By now, you should be able to post photos onto your blog that are on your computer. Now it's time to turn the corner a bit and take on a slightly different topic. Publishing your blog.

No, I'm not talking about when you actually publish the post to the blog. I'm talking about syndication. I'm talking about making your blog available for others to read. In blogger, it's called "Publishing Site Feed".

Why would you want to do this? Well, if you do, you can allow a couple of cool things to happen. For one, you can allow people to put your blog headlines into My Yahoo! Another reason is people can use aggregators either online or desktop applications to read your blog. More on this in a moment.

When you publish your feed, it takes your blog and converts it to RSS, XML, or Atom. Blogger.com uses Atom. For our purposes, don't worry about what these are. Just know it's a language that your blog is converted into so that these readers can, well, read them. Don't worry about it.

My favorite desktop reader is called SharpReader. Why should you consider it? Well, after you install it, it runs in your system tray and will constantly look for updates to your favorite blogs and news sites that syndicate their stuff. I have many blogs and news sites in mine. It basically surfs the web for me and lets me know when these sites are updated. To add sites to your reader, look for the feeds of blogs or sites. Look for buttons that have XML, RSS, or Atom on it. For instance, here is the orangejack Atom feed or use a site called Feedburner to convert Atom to XML. With feedburner, you can post cool things like this.

So how do you syndicate your blog so those of us who use these readers can stay updated with your blog? In blogger, just go into your settings, click on Settings then Site Feed. Tell it to Publish the Site Feed, and do me a favor...choose full description.

Next time: Marketing your Blog