I’m Out There, Jerry!
You know I could smack Michael Richards for being such a racist dope. “I’m out there, Jerry!” is truly one of the greatest lines in television.
In case you didn’t watch Seinfeld, Richards’ character, Kramer, decides not to wear underwear one day. He barges into Jerry’s apartment and announces “I’m out there, Jerry…and loving every minute of it!”
After Richards’ insane tirade, I’m tempted not to use this line. But it’s too good! I’m going to steal it anyway.
So, what’s the deal? Well, I finally got my feedburner icon on my blog, and it’s working! In other words…I’m truly out there!
To use another form of cultural vernacular: I’ve finally got my feed on!
This will tell you how inept I am. Back in November when I first found out about blogs, I had no idea what a feed even was. To read my favorite blogs, I would go to each one and see if the author had posted anything new. Quite inefficient! Then I discovered feedreaders. I use My Yahoo!, for what it’s worth.
Since part of my motivation is to uncomplicate this process for non-geeks like myself, let me describe what the issues were, and how I solved them.
So far I’ve been using the WordPress default theme. The theme is what gives your blog its look, and mine has the default look. It’s like it’s right out of the package, as it were.
Once I discovered the beauties of RSS syndication, I wanted that for my blog. I figure that the easier I make it for people to read me, the more readers I will have. Makes sense, right?
I found about Feedburner.com. It seems everyone who’s anyone uses that to power their feeds. I logged onto Feedburner, created an account (fairly easy to do), then “burned” my feed. That’s great marketing by the way! Nothing gets actually burned, but “burn” a feed sounds like so much better than “create” a feed. “Burn” has a sense of speed and urgency that “create” just doesn’t have.
Once I did that, I followed the instructions, which had me download a “plugin” and upload it to my blog. A plugin is a snippet of code that does stuff. You download the code to your computer, then upload the code to your host account. The downloading was easy enough. Uploading to my host, Bluehost, was fairly easy too.
I logged onto my host account, and found their FTP file transfer program, and moved the plugin code from my computer to my host account. (FTP = FileTransfer Protocol. This translates into a simple interface to move files from one computer to another.) That was easy enough.
Once I had the code on my account at my host. I logged into my WordPress account and accessed my dashboard. From there, I went to “Plugins”. There I “activated” the new plugin that I had installed.
I was so excited! I opened another tab in Firefox, then scrolled down to the bottom of my page where it says: “Entries (RSS)”. Well…I got an error message.
That was about two weekends ago. In my spare time (that’s a joke!) I played around with this to no avail. Well, today I finally figured out the problem!
I went to my Feedburner account and deleted all the feeds I had created, then started over. That didn’t work, either! I perused the Feedburner website until I got to a page where you could create icons. You see the icon at the top right corner of my page? I created that icon on this page on Feedburner. That gave me some code to insert into my templates, whatever that meant.
I got my WordPress book, WordPress 2 by Maria Langer, and found the part where you learn how to change themes. From the dashboard, there’s a link called “Presentations”. You click on that and then click on ” “Theme Editor”. The theme editor let’s you do just that, edit your theme.
Only problem was there are about ten possible files to choose from.
I wanted my icon at the top right hand corner of my sidebar. So, I chose the “sidebar” file and opened it.
I’ve alse been reading HTML, XHTML & CSS by Elizabeth Castro (same publisher), also a great book that I highly recommend. So, I’m slowly becoming familiar enough with HTML to read an HTML file and understand what’s going on.
Well, to cut the story short, I positioned my curser where I wanted the icon to be, clicked, then right clicked and copied the icon code into the sidebar code. At the bottom of the theme editor, you have a save button. I saved my changes, and in another tab opened my Absolutelee.com blog.
Success! Blessed success! The icon was there!
Better than that, when I clicked on it, it lead me to the subscribe page where I subscribed to my own feed.
If you like this post, then consider subscribing to my full-feed RSS!
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