Zen Zoomie’s Place: Chronicles of a (Wannabe) Pro Blogger

HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMERICA! In celebration of the greatest nation on Earth’s 231^st Birthday, we’ve set fire to Zen Zoomie’s Place and officially gone live on FeedBurner! Subscribe to our new and improved RSS feed here:

Zen Zoomie’s Place RSS Feed

If you’re not familiar with RSS feeds (“Really Simple Syndication”), they’re a great way to stay on top of the content from your favorite news websites and blogs. Most email and web browsing software has an integrated RSS reader that will allow you to subscribe to and read RSS feeds from all your favorite sites. Feedburner is a great tool to simplify RSS for subscribers (that’s you!) and content managers (that’s me).

Wordpress already handles RSS feeds nicely on its own, but FeedBurner has a number of advantages that convinced me to make the jump:

• SmartFeed feature automatically formats content based on the user’s software

• Excellent statistics and metrics capability to keep me informed about how my feed’s popularity is growing

• Some cool features to help publicize your blog

• FeedFlares can automatically be placed at bottom of posts and RSS feed to make it easier for users to social bookmark or otherwise share your content

• MOST IMPORTANTLY: FeedBurner just become FreeBurner on July 3! A number of the PRO features that Bloggers previously had to pay for (more detailed analytics, and “MyBrand” service) are now free.

If you use Wordpress on your own hosted site, getting going with FeedBurner is exceedingly easy. From start to finish, I spent about 15 minutes implementing FeedBurner on www.zenzoomie.com. The official FeedSmith plugin takes care of everything for you, and begins forwarding any requests for your old feed URLs to your new FeedBurner URL. To get started using Feedburner for your own hosted Wordpress blog, click on this link:

Getting Started with the Feedburner FeedSmith Plugin for Wordpress

P.S. As you celebrate today and enjoy the freedoms of our great country, please stop and take a moment to think about all of our Airmen, Soldiers, Sailors, and Marines that are deployed in harm’s way to ensure that you and your children can continue to enjoy those freedoms.