Adding Facebook Wall to a website using Feedburner

Being active on  Facebook, or any social network, takes time and effort. You can maximize the return on that effort by growing your followers and making your content widely available. Facebook wall updates can even be displayed on your website so they will be visible to those who aren’t yet following you, and will automatically update as your status changes.

It takes a little effort but here is how you do it.

  1. Visit your Facebook page and “view source” The method of doing this will vary with which browser you are using but generally if you “right click” the page you will be given an option to “View Source”
  2. On the page source code you need to look for the Rss feed for that page, try doing a page search for “atom”
  3. The line of code you find will look like this
    /feeds/page.php?id=XXXXXXXXXXXX&format=atom10
    where the XXX bit is your page ID
  4. The line of code needs to rewritten to include the full URL
    http://www.facebook.com//feeds/page.php?id=XXXXXXXXXXXX&format=atom10
  5. If you try a view this feed in a reader it will not work. However if you burn the feed using Feedburner the result is a fully functioning readable feed.
  6. Within the Feedburner dashboard select Publicize>BuzzBoost, and activate. BuzzBoost  republishes your feed as HTML , once configured a snippet of code will be generated which you can paste into your website.  The Buzzboost code can be easily styled via CSS to fit the look and feel of any website.

Here is one of our clients using Feedburner to display their Facebook page status updates

buzzboost Facebook RSS

© 2011 Chicago Web Designer

Syndication: Extending the reach of your blog.

You write to be read … correct? Here are a few simple tips to reach as many readers as possible.

extend the reach of your blog

Your Feed

Make it easy for readers to subscribe to your blog feed (RSS). This will ensure they see new posts promptly and don’t have to visit your blog to read them. Offer your visitors subscription options, e.g. via a reader or by email.

blog feed subscription

Automate Twitter

Set up your feed so  that your Twitter account automatically tweets a link to your new blog post. This is easily done using Google’s Feedburner .  To optimize the effectiveness of this make sure this is not the only use of your Twitter profile!

Automate Facebook

Configure your Facebook Fan page so your blog posts are automatically posted there.  There are various ways to do this either using the Facebook Notes function or an app like Social RSS or networked Blogs.  It is amazing how many additional readers you will get via this approach.

Automate LinkedIn

LinkedIn is another great social network which can be automatically setup to display your blog posts. Log in to your account and select > edit profile,  scroll down to applications and click > add an application.  You will be presented with various apps,  if you have a WordPress blog select the WordPress, all other blog select Blog Link.

Syndicate your RSS where ever you can

There are many sites which allow you to syndicate your blog content e.g Technorati, Blog Catalog and even Amazon has opened it’s door for you to syndicate your blog to the Kindle.

©: 2011 Chicago Web Designer

How to Subscribe to a Blog: St Louis web designers tip of the day

If you, are like me, and read a lot of blogs, it is not a good use of time to visit your favorite blogs every day just on the off chance there is something new to enjoy. A far more effective way is to subscribe to the blog and have new content delivered to you as and when it is published.

For those of us who have been blogging for many years this may seem like second nature but there are plenty of people out there for this is a whole new arena.

On a well designed blog there will be a button looking something like this

which is the universal icon for RSS feeds – a file associated with your blog.

Clicking the button will lead you to a page like this


Once on this page you are offered an abundance of ways to receive the content from the blog. One of my favorite is Google reader, which sends the new content of all your subscribed blogs to a single page – you can visit this page or set up a simple widget on your Google home page which allows you to read your content from there.

If you prefer you can subscribe to receive content from your favorite blogs via email.

The St Louis Web Designer’s tip of the day!

2009 © St Louis Web Designer