For those who read blogs through a reader, ever wonder how a blogger managed to get links like “Add to Delicious” or the number of comments to show up inside the reader itself? I know I certainly did. Thankfully, with the help of some productive Feedburner fumbling I am able to report to you all how to get your blogs feed to do the same thing (OK, so I was really looking for something else entirely and just came across it. But I’m still reporting to you all!). Don’t worry, it takes 4 super simple steps, slightly more if you don’t already have Feedburner.If you haven’t figured by now, you’ll need Feedburner. Feedburner is a tool that allows you to monitor a great deal of stats about your blogs — wait for it — feed! It is an incredibly helpful tool. In fact, if you don’t have Feedburner and you blog, get it. Right now. Once you’ve got Feedburner setup (if you had difficulty with this, let me know and I will help you through it) move on to the first step.
Step 1
After going into your Feed information area, you should see a horizontal navigation menu like the one above. Click the “Optimize” tab.
Step 2
From there you will see a list of services on your left. They all do particularly interesting things, but the one we are looking at specifically today is FeedFlare. Click FeedFlare.
Step 3
Clicking on FeedFlare will take you to a page with a whole lot of check boxes. What FeedFlare does is add some social media flare directly into your feed. Each piece of flare does something unique. To use any particular piece of flare, simply check the checkbox. In my case, I am only using “Add to Delicious”, “Comment Count”, and “Stumble It”.
You may notice there are usually 2 check boxes. The first causes your changes to apply to your feed. The second creates the widget that you have to add to your site. This means you actually have to copy and paste some code to get it work, versus the simplicity that was present for the feed.
Step 4
Once you’ve completed all of the above steps (You went to the Optimize tab, then the FeedFlare section, and select the flare you want to add) just click Activate. This will activate flare for your feeds. These changes will be applied to all posts in your feed, past, present, and future.
The end result will show up similar to the below (similar as you may be using different flare)
