All Feeds by Feedburner

Your blog generates feeds, you have these links on your blog pages, but how many people have actually subscribed to your feeds?

Feedburner is used by many of you to monitor those statistics. But thanks to Ramani I recently discovered that there is something like auto-detection, that makes other feedreaders or browsers (like Firefox) automatically detect and subscribe to feeds. Those subscribers are not monitored in the Feedburner-count, so here is a tutorial on how to make all feeds available by Feedburner only. It made my statistics jump from 35 subscribers to 70 in little more than a week.

Open your template in HTML-mode. Close to the top you will find this line of code:

<b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>

This line will not expand to the code behind it, even if you check the Expand Widget Template box. Now view your blog, right-click on it, and from the pop-up menu select "Source" (or the equivalent menu option from your browser). This will bring up a Notepad window, with the HTML-code of the displayed version of your blog. Look carefully at the top lines, and you will see that the widget-code is replaced with:

<meta content='text/html; charset=UTF-8' http-equiv='Content-Type'/>
<meta content='true' name='MSSmartTagsPreventParsing'/>
<meta content='blogger' name='generator'/><link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="YourBlogName - Atom" href="http://yourblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="YourBlogName - RSS" href="http://yourblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss" />
<link rel="service.post" type="application/atom+xml" title="YourBlogName - Atom" href="http://www.blogger.com/feeds/yourblogid/posts/default" />
<link rel="EditURI" type="application/rsd+xml" title="RSD" href="http://beta.blogger.com/rsd.g?blogID=yourblogid" />

In this example, YourBlogName stands for the title of your blog, yourblog.blogspot.com is your blog's url, and yourblogid is a long number, the id of your blog. The two lines with link rel="alternate", indicated in red, let newsreaders auto-detect your blogs feeds. So we have to change these lines to point them in the direction of your Feedburner feed. We'll do this in 2 easy steps.

Step 1: Make a backup of your template.

Open your template in HTML-mode, and download the template as a backup.

Step 2: Replace the widget code.

Remove the line:

<b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>

Replace it with:

<meta content='text/html; charset=UTF-8' http-equiv='Content-Type'/>
<meta content='true' name='MSSmartTagsPreventParsing'/>
<meta content='blogger' name='generator'/>
<link href='http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourblogname' rel='alternate' title='RSS' type='application/atom+xml'/>
<link rel="service.post" type="application/atom+xml" title="YourBlogName - Atom" href="http://www.blogger.com/feeds/yourblogid/posts/default" />
<link rel="EditURI" type="application/rsd+xml" title="RSD" href="http://beta.blogger.com/rsd.g?blogID=yourblogid" />

Replace the http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourblogname with the url to your Feedburner feed.

Now save your template.

Now that we have fixed the auto-detection part, there is still the issue of the feed-link on your posts page. This feed-link has to be made invisible, so that your visitor has no other option than following the link to your Feedburner feed.
The standard feedlink provided by Blogger is of class .feed-link.

Open your template in HTML-mode, and inside the skin look for the following line:

.feed-link {

Below this line add:

display: none;

If there is no class .feed-link defined in your template, define it with:

.feed-link { display:none; }

Now save your template.

Congratulations! Your visitors have no escape from Feedburner!