Syndicating Your Blog

Previously in this book we've talked a lot about RSS and Atom syndication. These are feeds that can be viewed with various feed readers and feed aggregators, so that interested users can view your most recent blog postings. When a new post is published, it is automatically recognized and displayed for anyone subscribing to your feed.

Blogger uses Atom for its blog syndication. When you activate Atom syndication for your blog, Blogger automatically generates a machine-readable version of your blog that can be read by most feed readers and aggregators.

To activate Atom syndication for your blog, follow these steps:

1.	From the Blogger Dashboard, click the Change Settings icon next to your blog name.
2.	When the Settings page appears, click the Site Feed tab, as shown in Figure 23.16. Figure 23.16. Configuring Atom syndication. [View full size image]
3.	Pull down the Publish Site Feed list and select Yes.
4.	Pull down the Descriptions list and select either Full (to publish the full content of each post) or Short (to publish only the first paragraph or so of each post).
5.	Click the Save Settings button.

Take notice of the URL for your site feed. It's typically your blog URL with /atom.xml attached, like this: myblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml. To place a link to this feed in your blog, add the following code to the sidebar section of your HTML template:

<a href="<$BlogSiteFeedUrl$>" title="Atom feed">Site Feed</a>