How to Set Up Feed, RSS, & Twitter Buttons on Your Blog

Sometimes people will forget you exist. You know, you haven’t thought about wild strawberries every day because they just aren’t around. They’re delicious- can you imagine if they showed up in your inbox? What a nice surprise! So make it easy for your readers to get such  nice surprise in their inbox with these pretty buttons…

So if you haven’t noticed, I set up a few new things on the right sidebar: one is “Get it RSS’d” and the other is “Get it in Email” and they are two handy things to click on if you want more Katanaville in your life. It is a nice place to live!

So you go to Feedburner and when you sign in, you’ll be on a “My Account” page. Then you put your website in here:

If you use Blogger it’ll be in there already…

Then you continue with “next” …

You’ll want to go to the Publicize tab on the My Account Page.

Then go to Chicklet Chooser. This little code at the bottom will give you a code for an RSS feed just like mine at the top right. (Have you clicked on it? You’ll want to do that, see where it takes you).

Then you go to your wordpress widgets, and insert a “text” widget. This is where you paste that code from Chicklet chooser.

Do you want to have a button for Email Subscribers and Twitter? Hang on to that code you just pasted, and repeat (Copy code, paste into a “Text” widget”) for email and twitter. Only, you’ll replace the links with the one you get from clicking on “Email Subscribers” in Feedburner, and with your twitter address: mine is http://twitter.com/katanabarnett.

But oh no! Now you have 3 RSS buttons that look the same but all link to “RSS” “Twitter” and “Email Subscribe”- how to tell them apart?! You’ll want to replace the Feedburner RSS icon, which looks like this [http://www.feedburner.com/fb/images/pub/feed-icon32x32.png] in the code with this: [http://img269.imageshack.us/img269/3195/twitterbirdie.png] or [http://img170.imageshack.us/img170/4900/26207682261ed59406b2.jpg] Without the brackets. You can also use your own images.

TO SUM UP:

Sign up for feedburner.

Insert your main page address.

Get “Email Subscribe” as well.

Get a Chicklet code.

Use the chicklet code for Twitter & Email, too,

— replacing the Feedburner RSS links with Twitter and Email Subscribe links.

— replacing the Feedburner RSS picture with another picture.

Paste into a Text Widget in your wordpress sidebar.