Tart up your blog’s feed with some Flickr photos
Do you use Feedburner for your blog’s RSS feeds? I set up a Feedburner account when I first started Lilahpops but I hadn’t spent much time learning the ins-and-outs of it. A couple of days ago I decided to check my subscriber count and have a bit of a look around. I found this neat optimisation solution which lets you splice your Flickr photostream into your blog feed.
See the screenshot of my feed below. It’s quite easy to see which ones are my website posts and what is streaming from Flickr. As the focus of my website is photography I thought this was quite a neat trick:
Wanna try it?
This is a very simple process:
- 1. Login to your Feedburner account and select your feed link under Feed Title
- 2. Select the Optimize tab
Look down the left-hand column at the items under Services. There is a tick next to each service you have applied to your feed. In my feed you’ll see I have BrowserFriendly, SmartFeed and Photo Splicer working so far:
- 3. Select the Photo Splicer option
- 4. Choose Flickr from the Photo Service (Flickr, BuzzNet or Webshots are available)
- 5. Type in your Flickr ID … don’t know it? Pop over to BigHugeLabs and do a quick search on your username
- 6. Choose how many photos you want included in your feed (mine is currently set to 5)
- 7. Click Activate
which will change to:
- 8. Click Save and your done. You can de-activate your selection at any time.
These are the settings I used:
The update to my feed didn’t change immediately but it didn’t take very long either. Now you have a nice visual treat for your subscribers!
I have to thank Iain from The West Ring for asking me how I got my Flickr photos into my blog feed and giving me the idea for this post.
Have you got any other Feedburner tips? Let me know in the comments.
:-D Glad to have been an inspiration! :lol: When I saw the title in Reader I just thought it was part of your Grand Plan. But thank you for the name-check and link.
Like you I had set up a Feedburner feed early on and not even looked at what else was available. As I’m still very irregular with adding my photos to Flickr I’m not sure whether I’ll set this up. Certainly good to know I can if I want to though.
BTW – what RSS reader do you use, and why? I tried Thunderbird a few years ago, didn’t like it and stopped bothering with RSS. Recently tried Google Reader because I thought it was about time I got on the RSS bandwagon and it works a treat. Obviously the main benefit is that it’s web-based but I also like the whole Google interface (am a massive Gmail fan). I’ve just had a thought! Was fairly sure I recognised the style of your screenshot – is it from iGoogle? I don’t actually use it myself as I’ve always got a variety of tabs open in Firefox.
8 simple steps to add your Flickr photos to your blog feed…
A simple tip on how to spice, or splice, up your feed with your Flickr photos. Give your RSS readers a visual treat!…
Anthea,
It is an extremely useful article about a great Feedburner feature I’ve never noticed.
Thanks a lot.
Best regards,
Tibor
the problem I find with that one is that, I don’t actually understand because sometimes even if I didn’t have updates or uploaded any new photo into flickr, feedburner kept delivering the latest photos.
I don’t know if there is a way so that feedburner will only attach my latest photos whenever I have new posts for their delivery as well. I mean, it’s a timing thing. For days that I don’t have any new post for feedburner to deliver, don’t attach or deliver as well photos from my flickr photostream. For days that I have new post in my blog, even if feedburner repeats the already spliced photos, i don’t care.
@ Iain, grand plan? You flatter me! The feed adds the photos in chronological order so you get a nice mix of posts and photos. I do upload quite frequently to Flickr, though. And yes, it is iGoogle, good spot! I have tons of feeds on my iGoogle homepage and the beauty of it is that you can set them up by subjects in tabs.
@ Tibor, thanks for your comment. I have your feed on my iGoogle homepage, I’ll keep an eye out for your Flickr photos!
@ deuts, it seems to be only adding my latest photos. Maybe it has something to do with the number of photos you selected to be included in the feed – mine is set to 5. Or you could simply de-activate the option when you are not posting to your blog for a period of time?
Yeah, it quite irks me, ‘coz I’m not posting to my blog yesterday, and in some days that I don’t have a new post, it repeats the already syndicated images and deliver to the inboxes of my subscribers, to the extent that I got afraid my subscribers would just consider emails from my blog as spam, and eventually unsubscribe.
But anyway, as you mentioned, I actually already did disable that option.
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