Tutorial: How to Make Recent Blog Work - Blog Forum

Nathan · #1 August 12th, 2009, 11:23 PM

Some of you members may have noticed the "Recent Blog" section under each members username. This is a great feature which uses your blog's feed to display a link to your latest blog post.

Because we get questions on how to set it up at least twice a week I figured I better write a tutorial.

Step One:

You must have a Feedburner Account set up.

http://feedburner.google.com is a great service that automatically crawls your feed and reformats it into a variety of different styles and formats that are easier to read. Theoretically your plain blog feed should work, but for some reason they don't always work, whereas Feedburner always works. I think it has to do with whether or not you use special character codes in your posts.

So to make a long story short sign up with Feedburner first.

Feedburner will give you a new feed address such as:

Code:

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/ExperimentGarden

Step Two:

At the top of the forum click the "Quick Links" menu and select "User Control Panel"

Step Three:

Click on "Edit Your Details". This link is located in the link list on the left hand side of the screen.

Step Four:

Scroll down the page and find the place where it says:

Quote:

Enter your Blog's RSS feed URL here

Enter the Feedburner feed address exactly as it is given to you by Feedburner. Your Feedburner address should look like the example I gave above.

Step Five:

Scroll down and click "Save Changes".

The results may not take effect immediately. If you just signed up for Feedburner or if you just added or just changed the Recent Blog feed it may take anywhere from few hours to a whole day for the new feed to begin being displayed beneath your user name.

Conclusion / Troubleshooting

When in doubt sign up for Feedburner. It is the fix for all problems relating to the feed not showing up in Recent Blog feature or showing an XML error.

If you have further questions feel free to ask them.