Blogging Tips

Blogger blogs publish a site feed in Atom format. Atom feeds work in a very similar way to RSS, and there is very little difference for either publishers or those who choose to subscribe.

Default Blogger templates (and indeed, many third party templates), each page will feature a link to subscribe to the Atom feed. On the main pages, this will link to the main site feed, whereas on post pages, this will link to the comments feed for a particular post, like this:

Most blog readers are familiar with feeds in RSS format, though not with Atom feeds. Therefore this link can be confusing, and may well discourage readers from subscribing!

In this post, I’ll explain how you can change the wording of this link which ensures a more appealing link to potential subscribers, and even how to remove this altogether!

How the “Subscribe to (Atom)” links are formed

The “feed links” which appear in your Blogger template are constructed in three parts:

• The <b:includable if=’feedlinks’ > section, which includes the dynamic code used to generate links to the appropriate feed.
• The <b:includable id=’feedlinksbody’ var=’links’> section, which generates the text and link code for the appropriate feed link.
• The <b:include id=’feedlinks’/> line, which tells Blogger the position in the template where these dynamic links should be displayed

We can change these sections of code to ensure these links are friendlier, and encourage readers to subscribe to our blogs, and can even remove the links altogether!

How to change the feed links message

There are many ways you could alter the message used for links to your feeds. Here are the main things you may prefer to change:

Remove “(Atom)” from the link text

As I mentioned earlier, many readers may be confused if a blog feed is offered in Atom (rather than RSS) format.

We can easily remove the “Atom” part of the feed link, so the message will read “Subscribe to: Posts” on the main page and “Subscribe to: Post Comments” on post pages.

Here is how this can be achieved:

1. Go to the Layout>Edit HTML page in your blog’s dashboard, and check the “expand widget templates” box.
2. Using the search function of your web browser, locate this phrase: (<data:f.feedType/>)
3. Delete this phrase! Then preview your template. You should now see on the home page that the (Atom) text is removed from the feed link, and can proceed to save your template.

To alter or remove the “Subscribe to” text

The “Subscribe to” text is generated by this line of code:

<data:feedLinksMsg/>

You can replace this line with a message of your own choosing, or simply delete it if you prefer this text not to be displayed at all.

How to remove the feed links altogether

If you display a link to your blog feeds elsewhere in your template, you may prefer to remove the feed links beneath your posts entirely.

This is very easy to achieve! Simply find this line of code in your Blogger template (make sure you have checked the “Expand widget templates” box:

<b:include name=’feedLinks’/>

And delete it!

To be sure this has worked, you can preview your blog template before saving it: the “Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)” link should now be removed from your layout, on post pages as well as the main page.

I hope this tutorial has helped you understand how to change or remove the subscription links from your Blogger template. Please feel free to share your thoughts on this method by leaving your comments and opinions below.