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[Dave]

I'm not a huge fan of RSS feeds, but a lot of people use them, particularly FeedBurner. FeedBurner was acquired by Google a ways back and now your FeedBurner account (if you have one) must be migrated to Google. "Must," okay? If you want to continue to use FeedBurner, you don't have a choice.

I recently did so and figured I'd share a little step-by-step, particularly in displaying the new code. (Note: There are a bunch of angry people complaining about their number of subscribers being lower after migration. Personally, I didn't encounter any problems. It's not clear whether or not Google is undercounting or FeedBurner was overcounting (I suspect the latter, but have no real evidence one way or another). Just put up a blog post about it. Anyone knocked off who is a loyal, regular reader of your site will come back and re-subscribe.)

1. Login to your account at FeedBurner. In a separate browser tab, login to the Google account you wish to use (probably your Gmail account). At the top of the page, you will see the words, "Hey! We are moving FeedBurner accounts to Google. Learn more or Move your account now," in a yellow display bar. (Note: Your FeedBurner.com account will be dead after you complete the move. That's okay. You'll have a new Google FeedBurner account when you're done.)

2. Click, "Move your account." If you've logged in to your Google account, you'll see that account checked off on the next screen. Click, "Next."

3. Not much on this screen. Click, "Move feeds." Now you will see a screen explaining that your account is being moved. Keep this tab open. It will take a minute or two. Go surf with another tab or do whatever. You'll get an email when it's done. You will see the word, "Success!" in big letters.

4. Now go to http://feedburner.google.com to see your new feed. (The second time you visit, you may be taken to a "click here to start using your Google FeedBurner account" page. This happened to me. It's okay. Just do it. All your info is safe.)

Now you can go through all the feed management options.

[Dave]

Displaying the Google FeedBurner subscription link.

Now that you've gone through this trouble, you need to add the code to your site for display. I'm specifically talking about email subscriptions. If you use it, click, "Subscription Management."

There are two pieces of code Google FeedBurner supplies. I'll use my site as an example. There's a large chunk and a simple link. Let's look at the simple one first.

Subscribe to Maximum Awesome by Email

CODE

Subscribe to Maximum Awesome by Email

Feel free to use that or wrap it around the image of your choice (instead of that text). Not terrible right?

Here's the biggie:

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

CODE

Enter your email address:

Delivered by FeedBurner

Notice it's kinda, "eh." It takes up too much space, there are unnecessary line breaks (paragraph tags), and there's a pointless plug for FeedBurner at the bottom. (It looks worse than usual here because it's conflicting with some other CSS elements.) Some people argue you need a huge, huge subscription thing with blinking lights on your blog. Others are confident readers aren't completely retarded and will find the subscription field as long as you don't bury it. I believe the latter.

1. So let's clean up the code. First off, I don't like inline CSS. I prefer to put my CSS in a CSS file, so I start out with

CODE

In this case, "subscribe" is an id that's defined in the CSS files. If you don't know what I'm talking about, don't panic. For this example, let's just take out the inline CSS (where it says, "style="border:1px, etc.").

2. Delete all the paragraph tags.

CODE

3. Deleted that, "Delivered by FeedBurner" junk at the bottom. You don't need that.

CODE

Enter your email address:

4. Again, where it says "input type="text" style="width:140px"…" I define a CSS id or class because I have a lot more "style" stuff to add--background color, font color, etc.--so that it blends in with the site's design. But that little "width:140px" can work just fine if that's all you need.

Here's what it looks like:

Enter your email address:

You can tweak this to your heart's content.