Feeds for Blogger sites

Scott Birdby Scott Bird | December 30, 2005
Filed in News

For those of you currently using Blogger sites, you may have wondered in the past how to add your own feeds. I’ve just stumbled across a solution for the tricky one - the comments feed.

The main feed is pretty simple. A default Blogger site is already set up to publish an Atom feed, and by typing «your blog name»/atom.xml into your favourite feed reader you’ll be able to see this feed. That same address can then be added to your sidebar etc.

For the comments feed, a little more trickery is involved. It’s not actually that difficult, and well worth the effort as it suddenly becomes easier for people to see when there is a response to a comment they’ve made on your blog.

There are 3 steps in this process :

  1. Look at the email address that receives all the comments (if you don’t have one set up, and simply go to your own site occasionally to see what’s happening, login to your site and take a look at the bottom of the ‘Comments’ tab under ‘Settings’ - there’s a box here for an email address). Make sure you can forward these emails to another email address (for example, Gmail can, Yahoo can’t).
  2. Have a look at MailBucket.org. This is a free, public email -> RSS thingy. Think of a name, and have a look at www.mailbucket.org/«the name you just though of> to see if it hasn’t already been taken. Try something else if it has. In your original comments email system, create a filter to forward any comments (as they appear) to «the name you just thought of»@mailbucket.org. This will automatically be published as the RSS feed www.mailbucket.org/«name you just thought of».xml .
  3. The address of this feed can now be added to the sidebar etc, along with the main feed.

If you’re not quite sure what I’m on about, drop me an email.


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