You’ve no doubt seen a list of buttons similar to the above at many blog sites. They provide the reader a quick way to subscribe to their feed reader of choice. Visually they provide quick identification to the reader they are familiar with, their eye is trained to look for such buttons. And one a reader has subscribed to your feed, you’ve got yourself a regular reader who you will be staying in front of and not getting forgotten about.

There is actually a WordPress plugin called Subscribe Me that automatically adds several of these buttons to your site. I just don’t personally care for the plugin, I like having more control of how they look and are set up, but it may be a quick and easy way for some of you that just want to get some subscribe buttons in the sidebar quickly.

But now let’s talk about setting them up manually and making them look nicer…

My first problem with the buttons is they are all different sizes and styles as well as several homemade versions floating around, so I’ve created my own based on the original official buttons when available. You can see them at the top of this post, feel free to steal them. Or if you want to customize them more, swap plus signs and colors, or make some new ones, you can download my Photoshop file that’s got them all set up as layers.

DOWNLOAD “Subscribe.psd” (25kb)

You could probably fill a couple pages having a subscribe icon for every possible reader service out there, I’ve tried to cover most of the major ones. I used Alexa to get an idea of how popular the services were and ordered them as such. With Yahoo, MSN and Google being the top 3 sites, I figured I better have their subscribe buttons in there as well as the newer Windows Live. AOL is ranked at 55 so that’s up there too, so is LiveJournal at 70 but that requires an extra step I’ll cover below.

Here’s the rest of the subscribe buttons I chose to include with their current Alexa ratings:
Bloglines 666
NetVibes 797
NewsGator 4,727
PageFlakes 7,946
NewsBurst 107,548
Feedlounge 192,634

You could add more, or slim them down just keeping the most popular. You could even replace them with a “more” button and have another page that has all of them and just keep the main few on your main page if you don’t want to clutter things up.

Now let’s talk about the URL’s you should use to link each one.

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RSS/XML, here’s your basic feed link. If you are using “permalinks” for wordpress, then there is a nice pretty URL for it:

http://yoursite.com/feed

otherwise your link is this:

http://yoursite.com?feed=rss2

We’ll assume you are using the permalink URL for the rest of these, but you can certainly replace the sample feed URL with any feed URL of your choosing, whether you are using WordPress or similar software to produce your feeds, or even a fine service such as RSSPECT.

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Yahoo has a “My Yahoo” page where you can select from there content as well as add your own from feeds. The URL you should use for a reader to add your feed to their My Yahoo page is:

http://add.my.yahoo.com/rss?url=http://yoursite.com/feed

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Like Yahoo, MSN has a My MSN page. The only problem is that you can only add feed content which has been indexed, which it is either slow, quirky and or picky about doing. I suggest setting up a MyMSN account if you don’t have one and try to add your feed to the page. If it does not show up this should put it into the index queue. I still haven’t gotten the feed for this site to show up in there, yet you can add the feed for the ComicPress 2.0 demo site, heh.

Here is the URL to use if you are lucky enough to have your feed show up there:

http://my.msn.com/addtomymsn.armx?id=rss&ut=http://yoursite.com/feed

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Live is a much better site than MSN, and has a lot of cool stuff. Again a user can add your feed to a custom page there by using the following URL:

http://www.live.com/?add=http://yoursite.com/feed

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Here’s the URL to add your feed to Google’s feed reader:

http://fusion.google.com/add?feedurl=http://yoursite.com/feed

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I’ve never used or tested this one but this is suppose to be the URL to add a feed at AOL:

http://feeds.my.aol.com/add.jsp?url=http://yoursite.com/feed

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Bloglines is a very popular and well done online feed reader. I’d use it myself but I use my mail program (Thunderbird) on my own computer for feeds. It would be my feed reader of choice if I were to go on extended vacation. It does just that, displays feeds for clean and easy reading, not a page full of a bunch of clunky widgets that tries to be your control panel to the universe like most of these other sites. Here’s the URL:

http://www.bloglines.com/sub/http://yoursite.com/feed

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It seems NetVibes seems to run pretty closely behind Bloglines in popularity… but… clunky. Here’s the URL:

http://www.netvibes.com/subscribe.php?url=http://yoursite.com/feed

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Newsgator has been around a while and has a good amount of users. Here’s the URL:

http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/subscriber/subext.aspx?url=http://yoursite.com/feed

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PageFlakes URL to add your feed:

http://www.pageflakes.com/subscribe.aspx?url=http://yoursite.com/feed

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Rojo URL to add your feed:

http://www.rojo.com/add-subscription?resource=http://yoursite.com/feed

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NewsBurst is CNET’s online feed reader. Judging by the low ranking, apparently all the techies that read CNET know there are better ways to read feeds.

http://www.newsburst.com/Source/?add=http://yoursite.com/feed

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Feedlounge. I know nothing about it but it runs the tail end of my included feed subscribe buttons. Sounds like a nice place to hang out… and… feed. This URL could send the visitor to outer-space for all I know…

http://my.feedlounge.com/external/subscribe?url=http://yoursite.com/feed

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LiveJournal, major blogging/network site. This is an interesting one I’ve tacked on. LiveJournal isn’t really geared as a feed reader, but users do have a friends page they read, and you can create a new account that just pulls posts from a feed that you can add to these friends pages. The only problem is that it takes a paid subscriber to create one of these accounts. They just have to name it and include the feed’s URL and it is set for life, in fact it can’t even be edited by anyone ever again.

If you set up an LJ feed, this is the URL you would use so someone could easily add it to their friends page:

http://www.livejournal.com/friends/add.bml?user=yourusername

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That should be more than enough to get your subscribe buttons going on your site. If you have any suggestions for other services to include, then leave them in the comments. Or if you make some of your own buttons you’d like to share.

Oh and here’s the code I used to pop them into the sidebar on this page so that they would adapt to the stylesheet, edit it as needed and paste it somewhere between the first <ul> and last </ul> if you are using the ComicPress or similar WordPress theme based on the default theme:

<li><h2>Subscribe</h2>
<ul>
<li><a href="http://yoursite.com/feed"><img src="http://yoursite.com/subscribe-rss.gif" /></a></li>
<li><a href="http://add.my.yahoo.com/rss?url=http://yoursite.com/feed"><img src="http://yoursite.com/subscribe-yahoo.gif" alt="Subscribe at MyYahoo!" /></a></li>
<li><a href="http://my.msn.com/addtomymsn.armx?id=rss&ut=http://yoursite.com/feed"><img src="http://yoursite.com/subscribe-msn.gif" alt="Subscribe at MyMSN" /></a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.live.com/?add=http://yoursite.com/feed"><img src="http://yoursite.com/subscribe-windowslive.gif" alt="Subscribe at Windows Live" /></a></li>
<li><a href="http://fusion.google.com/add?feedurl=http://yoursite.com/feed"><img src="http://yoursite.com/subscribe-google.gif" alt="Subscribe at Google" /></a></li>
<li><a href="http://feeds.my.aol.com/add.jsp?url=http://yoursite.com/feed"><img src="http://yoursite.com/subscribe-aol.gif" alt="Subscribe at MyAOL" /></a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.bloglines.com/sub/http://yoursite.com/feed"><img src="http://yoursite.com/subscribe-bloglines.gif" alt="Subscribe at Bloglines" /></a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.netvibes.com/subscribe.php?url=http://yoursite.com/feed"><img src="http://yoursite.com/subscribe-netvibes.gif" alt="Subscribe at Netvibes" /></a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/subscriber/subext.aspx?url=http://yoursite.com/feed"><img src="http://yoursite.com/subscribe-newsgator.gif" alt="Subscribe at Newsgator" /></a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.pageflakes.com/subscribe.aspx?url=http://yoursite.com/feed"><img src="http://yoursite.com/subscribe-pageflakes.gif" alt="Subscribe at PageFlakes" /></a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.rojo.com/add-subscription?resource=http://yoursite.com/feed"><img src="http://yoursite.com/subscribe-rojo.gif" alt="Subscribe at Rojo" /></a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.newsburst.com/Source/?add=http://yoursite.com/feed"><img src="http://yoursite.com/subscribe-newsburst.gif" alt="Subscribe at Newsburst" /></a></li>
<li><a href="http://my.feedlounge.com/external/subscribe?url=http://yoursite.com/feed"><img src="http://yoursite.com/subscribe-feedlounge.gif" alt="Subscribe at FeedLounge" /></a></li>
<li><a href="http://www.livejournal.com/friends/add.bml?user=yourusername"><img src="http://yoursite.com/subscribe-livejournal.gif" alt="Subscribe at LiveJournal" /></a></li>
</ul>
</li>

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 22nd, 2007 at 2:11 pm and is filed under Tips & Tricks. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.