An Invitation to Bloggers in AdoptionLand

I am always amazed at the pure volume now of us in AdoptionLand speaking out. When Musings of the Lame was first “born” in 2005, there was literally a handful of us who were “birthmother bloggers”, and now, thankfully, so many others have added their voice to our chorus. Now, if you are like me, you might have trouble keeping up. I know I do. And there doesn’t seem to be enough time in the day to read, comment, contribute, and keep on top of the many strong valid voices. Heck, half the time I don’t have enough daylight to even be able to keep up with all the things I want to write about and the various ideas and projects that are so vitally important to the Adoption Truth cause. So, I have an idea that hopefully will help!

Adoption Blog Syndication!

Your blog, your story, your words, your voice. You don’t have to do anything else but keep on what you are doing the way you are doing it. And after the initial set up, I don’t have to do anything either, but your post will be published here on Musings of the Lame.

Now, of course the valid question for you is why would you want to do that?

I think most of us write because we have something valid to say and we do want to share our point of view. That’s important as all our voices matter, but the things is, of course, it only works if someone else actually sees our words and reads them.  And that’s what syndication on MOTL can do; you WILL get more people reading your words.  This isn’t about tooting my own horn, but the fact is that this site usually ranks number one nationally in Google for many relevant and important search terms.  And yes, there is that simple fact that over a third of a million pages, 377,378 URLs to be exact, were seen on the site here in 2014. Most “posts” initially are seen by approximately 1000 readers. However, I can also say that I know there is a direct correlation between the number of posts and the amount of views; more posts generates way more traffic- so in this way the system continues to feed itself!

Are you in? Please?

All I Need is Your Ok, Your URL or Your  Feed

Another time when I get all geeky, but I’ll shall explain as simply as possible. And for the most part, I CAN find your feeds myself, so really- I just need you to send me a note saying yes.. here’s my blog, syndicate it. But if you want to learn more about RSS feeds and how they work as a great tool.. read on!

Most blogs and websites have automatically what is called a RSS feed.  You can read more about RSS feeds themselves over here, but the basic gist is that the feed  is a tool that allows your blog/site content to be read more easily on other places.  A great example of  what a feed can do is the Adoption page on Alltop or the way many blogs get posted to Facebook using NetworkedBlogs on Facebook. Both of these use feeds.

RSS feeds are also the tool that allows your readers to subscribe to all your posts and get them in your email. See, this is mine: http://feeds.feedburner.com/blogspot/NwIQ So not only can a reader subscribe to MOTL here and not miss a post, but I can do things like take the feed URL and drop it in other places if they accept a RSS feed though less and less places do that anymore.

Anyway, if you send me your feed address, I can set it up so you get posted here. All the posts are syndicated and will come out on the regular “blog” portion of this site itself.  They are set up right now (and this might changed depending on if I have the add more definitive categories) to be archived on the More  Adoption Blogs pages. I’ll  also give you your own page like this one for Musings of a BirthMom (that was my test case! Thank you!)  where you can provide the “bio” info and other links as you wish.

How to Find Your RSS Address

Most feeds are pretty simple to find.

It’s the URL/feed.. usually.. mostly. Sometimes it’s the URL /blog/feed/ or /feeds/posts/default. On WordPress they default to these most often: http://domain.tld/feed/ (RSS 2.0 format), http://domain.tld/feed/rss2/ (RSS 2.0 format), http://domain.tld/feed/rss/ (RSS 0.92 format), http://domain.tld/feed/rdf/ (RDF/RSS 1.0 format), http://domain.tld/feed/atom/ (Atom format) . That’s’ the URL we are looking for here!

Now hopefully, you already have your feed listed on the blog front end for your readers. If that is the case, then you just have to look for your RSS symbol and click it. I know both Blogger and WordPress have these features automatically as they are important, so poke around if you do not have it set up.

For instance, Blogger has a widget that you can add that is called “Follow by Email” . It should find your feed address and add it in and then add the RSS button and email subscription form to your site.

If you just can’t find your feed:

Now if you cannot find your feed address, no matter what web browser you’re using, you can look at the HTML source of your page. To see the “source” hover on your site home page and right click. Then, click again her it says ” View Page Source.”

Once the window appears with the HTML for your page, use the “Find” feature (typically Ctrl-F on a PC, Command-F on a Mac) and search for RSS (without the quotes).

You should be taken to a line that reads something like:

<link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”Example” href=”http://www.aweber.com/blog/feed/” />

The RSS feed’s URL address is found between the quotes after href=. In this case, it would be:
“http://www.aweber.com/blog/feed/” Sometimes they say this after your URL: /feeds/posts/default

If you have trouble you can also  go here and try typing in your blogs or sites name. http://ctrlq.org/rss/ and you can check and validate your feed here, http://feedvalidator.org/, if you choose to make sure it works.

Is Your Blog Feed Styled?

Since I am talking feeds, and maybe have you concerned, I do want to mention the aspect of styles.  No, I don’t mean fashion colors. Basically, one feed has more programming telling the feed what to look like while the other is raw data. If you have never ever done anything with your feed before, there is a good chance that it might not look very readable to the average person.

Un-styled Feeds look like this:

As compared to mine, for example that looks like this:

Using Feedburner

Now one of my favorite feed tools for when I set up websites and blogs professionally is Feedburner. Feedburner is owned now by Google so you need to use your Gmail/Google account to sign in, but once you do that, then all you really need to do is put in your site url and tell feedburner to “burn” it for you. There are several of the tools that are good there; like the email subscription code, the image burner, geo-tagging and smart feed. I also like to connect to my twitter account (under Socialize) so all the posts get Tweeted automatically!

I used to have a whole step by step check list that walked you through how to use the Feedburner tools the best, but I cannot find it. However I will be making a new one for my AAC SEO presentation. If you want in on that when I make it, please let me know!

Send Me Your Feeds!!

So let’s do this! I’m happy to include a full range of the voices, so adoptees included as well as original families of course. Granted, it goes without saying I will not be adding any feeds from blogs that are more like this propaganda crap.  But after the initial “approval”, I won’t be editing or censoring or anything; it’s just YOUR pure voice.
If you need help, let me know and send your feed! That’s ALL you have to do!