Hi Dea, I’m a newbie blogger and am learning more daily about what blogging is about and the best ways to promote my posts. Here is a fantastic post written by @kristi-hines  about RSS feed and a variety of great ways to promote your posts. I think its the perfect starter kit for new bloggers. I followed the suggestions here and have already noticed a difference in my site traffic. Dyane

  @kristi-hines  You’re very welcome.  I’m very grateful to you for writing it! I don’t have to waste time searching for places to share my posts and even more time learning how to set it up properly (i.e. Feedburner).  

My pleasure  @deairby

“RSS is built in to most blogging platforms”

I’m hoping Kristi (@kristi-hines) or someone else can confirm my suspicions …  When you have a blog that is on a platform that doesn’t have RSS built in, do you then need to create and upload an XML file to your site, or can you obtain an RSS feed URL through, say, Feedburner?  Or does Feedburner just help to deliver content once a feed has already been established?

I’m working with a blog that is set up in Embedded Blogs on a Network Systems-hosted website, and there does not appear to be any direct means of getting a RSS feed set up.  I’m relatively green in this area, but from what I’ve found searching the Internet, it looks like the XML code is mapped out and fairly straightforward, but I get the impression you have to manually update it with each new additional blog post, which I’m hoping you wouldn’t have to do through some other means.

Can someone help me connect the dots? 

Thanks @kristi-hines for confirming what I thought (re: Feedburner). 

When I clicked on “Help” to the blog I was working on, it took me here:

http://www.embeddedblogs.com/home.php

As best I can tell, Embedded Blogs is an arm of Network Solutions. (At the bottom of that page is “Copyright © 2008 Network Solutions LLC.”)

And, yes, you would think Embedded Blogs would provide the means of an RSS feed, but one of their September 2008 blog posts states: “We’re aggressively working to continue to enhance and improve EmbeddedBlogs.  Some of these features include:     … RSS (Really Simple Syndication)”

However, I find no further notations to confirm that it’s now available, and when I search the general help for Network Solutions, I don’t find anything that says how to confirm the feed URL or that one of their embedded blogs even has one.

In the meantime, I’m thinking this is somewhat related to a WordPress blog, so I’m going to try to define the feed URL as though it is WP and see if that works.

@hjelliott I think there are RSS creator software packages you can buy to manually create RSS feeds or websites with free online RSS creators like this one - http://www.toucanmultimedia.com/rssmaker.php.  I also wrote a post about creating a custom XML / RSS feed from scratch -  http://kikolani.com/creating-custom-rss-feed-for-guest-posts.html.  The main thing is, of course, remembering to update it.  :)