MercuryNewsPhoto.com redesigned while I wasn’t looking, and what popped out is a nice modern WordPress blog. Cool.
What that means, first things first, is that I (and you) can now subscribe to an RSS feed from the site. Cool.
Second things second, you can leave comments on all the slideshows, video essays, and Flash presentations on the site. Cool.
Here’s a tip, guys: The default WordPress footer has that weird link to the RSS feeds that starts with “feed://” — if you click on it from Firefox, it tries to load whatever feedreader it can find on your hard drive, which can and will confuse people. (Hey Matt, what’s the deal with that, anyway? Lorelle points out in comments that it’s the individual theme developers who choose how to display the feed URL.) Anyway, I’d love to see a link to the RSS feed in the sidebar.
Looks great guys – keep it up!
Comments
3 responses to “Mercury News Photo becomes a blog. Cool.”
The feed link can be anywhere the WordPress Theme designer puts it. For some, it’s in the footer, for others in the sidebar. For others, like yourself, it is also in the post meta data.
It looks like you have changed the link in your footer to load the feed in feedburner, which might cause some confusion with some feed readers.
If you have the full version of WordPress, you can put the feed wherever you want it in your WordPress Theme.
As for Firefox loading the feed, well, that’s what it does. It’s supposed to. A feed reader will find the feed and stick it in your feed list, if you activate the “search for feeds on this page” feature. Otherwise, if someone just clicks the link, then they will see the feed, either in Firefox or whatever feed reader is set as the default. Just like when you click on a .doc document, it loads Word in order to see the document.
As for the announcement about MercuryNewsPhoto – that’s just too exciting. Wow. Thanks for letting us know!
Er, I should toss in a disclaimer that I’ve got nothing to do with MercuryNewsPhoto, so any “announcement” is theirs to make!
I did switch to feedburner recently, so I switched all my RSS links to reflect that. Not sure of any problems with aggregators, but I use web-based feedreaders pretty exclusively. I can see the benefit of having the “feed://” style links automagically load RSS feeds straight into a desktop reader, but isn’t that confusing to the average user? I’m sure I’m not the first person to kick this around, but I still don’t get why it’s the default setting.
I guess I don’t understand what you mean by “default setting”. It is what it is and any feed reader, including feedburner, can read it. The “feed://” you talked about isn’t “normal” or a default for WordPress Themes. It was there by the Theme designer not WordPress. That method isn’t that common. The most common link is example.com/feed and works really well for everything. If your WordPress Theme featured the feed:// in the link, then you could change it easily, which you did to feedburner, or you could use just the straight link.
By replacing it with only feedburner, some readers might not recognize it as a feed, and it wouldn’t be coming from your site but through feedreader, which means that once they register, your feed statistics would only be measured through feedreader, not necessarily by your blog stats, since they wouldn’t actually be “visiting” your site. Does that make sense?
You can do whatever works for you, I just hope I’m helping you understand a little more about how this works and that the WordPress developers did nothing wrong, and it was a choice your Theme designer made.
You might want to check out WordPress Feeds and Customizing WordPress Feeds in the WordPress Codex for specifics on how the WordPress Theme designer might have done what they did and what your options are.