Saturday, January 03, 2004

Getting the free RSS feed Generators to Work with Blogger

I have had several bloggers ask me how I got the RSS generators to work with Blogger, as they have had problems. I had problems when I first started, the following workaround should work for you:

If you are using certain templates supplied by blogger.com (including the one this blog is based on) you may behaving problems getting the RSS feed to include your titles. This is because the the permalink anchor (the code that allows you to make a URL for each post) for your posts is placed after the title. The permalink anchor is what the RSS generator considers to be the start of the post.

You need to change it to go before the title in your template.

Look for the <BlogItemTitle> tag in your template. The code that reads:

<a name="<$BlogItemNumber$>">&nbsp;</a>

needs to come after this tag or at least before the <$BlogItemTitle$> tag. This tag tells the RSS feed generator that this is the start of a new post and creates each feed item from this point. Previously I had the following code from the original template:

<BlogItemTitle><h2><$BlogItemTitle$><br></h2><a name="<$BlogItemNumber$>">&nbsp;</a></BlogItemTitle>

To fix the problem I changed the code to look like this:

<BlogItemTitle><a name="<$BlogItemNumber$>">&nbsp;</a><h2><$BlogItemTitle$><br></h2></BlogItemTitle>

Note that my other blog, Noo Meeja Ads didn't have this problem and worked immediately with the RSS generators, and this one uses one of the blogger supplied templates. Some of the templates out there have the permalink anchor in the right place - don't bother with my workaround unless your RSS feed is missing the titles.

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