craig strachan (wordpress cape town syndication handouts)
DESCRIPTION
Using the power of feeds to increase your readership by automate distributing your content. Learn how to increase your readership and gain more exposure to your blog. Learn how to use existing (and mostly free) tools to set-up a system get automatically display your blog posts on Facebook, LinkedIn & Twitter. Find out how to provide automated email subscription to new blog posts, and monitor which of these channels are most effective in increasing readership.TRANSCRIPT
Syndicate your
blog posts with
little effort!
The bad old days
…and now
How do you find
the time to post
you photos in so
many places?
I don’t!
It is easy
But it requires a
little magic
The Magic of Syndication• “A feed is a machine readable (usually XML) content publication that is updated
regularly. Many weblogs publish a feed (usually RSS, but also possibly Atom and RDF and so on). There are tools out there that call themselves "feedreaders". What they do is they keep checking specified blogs to see if they have been updated, and when the blogs are updated, they display the new post, and a link to it, with an excerpt (or the whole contents) of the post. Each feed contains items that are published over time. When checking a feed, the feedreader is actually looking for new items. New items are automatically discovered and downloaded for you to read. Just so you don't have to visit all the blogs you are interested in. All you have to do with these feedreaders is to add the link to the RSS feed of all the blogs you are interested in. The feedreader will then inform you when any of the blogs have new posts in them. Most blogs have these "Syndication" feeds available for the readers to use. “
• http://codex.wordpress.org/Introduction_to_Blogging#
Huh?
Syndication - “The bullet points slide”
• Usually Really Simple Syndication – RSS• Made for computers to read - XML view• Not for people to read• Built into WordPress (yay!)• Updates automatically (whenever you post!)
• Applies to posts only, not pages
Try it at home
• Simple add /feed to the address of your blog
• E.g.• http://www.notesfromthecape.com/feed
http://www.notesfromthecape.com/feed
Remember this from
earlier
A little more
advanced
http://www.notesfromthecape.com/category/daily-photo
http://www.notesfromthecape.com/category/daily-photo/feed
Email subscriptions
Free, but
limited
Great stats!
Highly
customizable,
but paid service
• Both send email
• Both use the blog feed
• Both have signup form
Getting really
fancy now
• http://Myblog/feed
• http://Feedblitz/newfeed
You create the
content, and
automate the
syndication
• www.craigstrachan.com• [email protected]• www.facebook.com/cdstrachan• @cdstrachan