Posts Tagged ‘Feedburner’

Question Asked: How Do I Setup Email Subscriptions in FeedBurner for WordPress?

WordPress comes with a built in RSS feed. However, many people may be unfamiliar with RSS and therefore not comfortable with it.

An alternate solution to expand on the basic functionality of WordPress’ built in feed, is to utilize FeedBurner.

FeedBurner is a Google owned product that has a number of features available to enhance any RSS feed, including e-mail subscriptions, which is our ultimate goal.

  1. Sign up for an account at FeedBurner.
  2. When logged in, you’ll want to “Burn a Feed”, which is rather simple.  Input the full URL of the website you’re creating this e-mail notification for. (Ie; http://www.website.com/site/feed)
  3. The next page will allow you to select a “Feed Title” and “Feed Address.”  For “Feed Title” enter the name of the department.  For “Feed Address”, enter something that represents your site.
  4. Click the “Next” button.
  5. The next page will show you what the URL is, and allow you to proceed to Step 2, to configure more options. Click the “Next” button.
  6. On Step 2, you can configure more options, but don’t have to. The options you’ll want, for this purpose, are already enabled.  Click “Next” to proceed.
  7. On the “My Feed” page, select “Publicize”, then select “E-mail Subscriptions” in the left hand navigation.
  8. Click the “Activate”, the page will refresh and provide you the code you need to allow people to sign up.
  9. Select the code in the box on the page.  It will look like this: 
    <form style="border:1px solid #ccc;padding:3px;text-align:center;"
action="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify" method="post"
target="popupwindow" onsubmit="window.open('
http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=username', 'popupwindow',
'scrollbars=yes,width=550,height=520');return true"><p>Enter your email address:</p>
<p><input type="text" style="width:140px" name="email"/></p><input type="hidden"
value="username" name="uri"/><input type="hidden" name="loc" value="en_US"/>
<input type="submit" value="Subscribe" /><p>Delivered by <a href="http://
feedburner.google.com" target="_blank">FeedBurner</a></p></form>
  10. Login to your WordPress site, and create a new page titled “Subscribe”, and paste the code into it, in HTML view.
  11. Since WordPress removes the javascript that executes the popup window, you’ll need to save the page, then modify the code. After you save the page, the code will be rendered as: 
    <form style="border:1px solid #ccc;padding:3px;text-align:center"
action="http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify" method="post"
target="popupwindow"><p>Enter your email address:</p><p><input type="text"
style="width:140px"></p><input type="hidden" value="username"><input type="hidden"
name="loc"><input type="submit" value="Subscribe" /><p>Delivered by <a href="http://feed
burner.google.com" target="_blank">FeedBurner</a></p></form>
  12. Replace the “Action” URL with: 
    http://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/mailverify?uri=username

    Be sure to replace “username” with the FeedBurner username you created.

  13. Save the page.

This subscription form will allow people to sign up for new notifications of content via your website, automatically.  Within FeedBurner, a user can stipulate many features of that e-mail:

  • Link color
  • Text color
  • Time sent
  • E-mail address sent from
  • Name on e-mail address sent from
  • Logo in e-mail
  • Etc.

Now, once a day people who “subscribe” via e-mail will receive a daily digest of everything you’ve posted.  It’s that simple.

There are also a number of plugins that will allow you to do this in a Widget, rather than “page”, but that’s a preference that’s up to you.

Comments 0 Jul 3rd, 2009
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