bloglines syndication – read the structions

I wanted to monitor this blog with bloglines. So, as usual these days, I decided to see if I could do it by just pointing at some things and clicking on some things.

The ’sub with bloglines’ button available from bloglines itself didn’t work. My browser spat out the message ” No feeds were found. Please verify that the website publishes an RSS feed.”

So then I tried to do it from the bloglines site. I clicked on ‘add’ on the ‘my feeds’ page. I followed the instructions there (“Enter the URL of the blog you wish to subscribe to.”) and clicked ’subscribe’. Same error. I tried various variants on the URL:
‘lollipop.wordpress.com’, ‘http://lollipop.wordpress.com’, ‘lollipop.wordpress.com/feed’ and variants.

I viewed the source, and verified that there was indeed a feed:

"link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="wendy’s wordpress RSS 2.0" xhref="http://lollipop.wordpress.com/feed/" mce_href="http://lollipop.wordpress.com/feed/"                  />"

I tried different combinations of bits out of the above in the ‘URL’ field on the ‘add feed’ page, all to no avail.

I browsed google and the blogosphere for awhile, learning interesting stuff about syndication in general, but still no joy.
I finally tried reading the wordpress manual.

For some reason, I find the wordpress manual difficult to follow. It’s not that the instructions are poor once I find them – they are clearly written and generally, as in this instance, quite helpful! The problem is _finding_ the bits you want. This seems strange, considering their genius for tagging. Ah well twill ponder this further later…
Anyway, I had almost given up when I found the answer in, of all places, the ‘instructions’. (Or ‘codex’ as the online wordpress manual is called.)
I have excerpted the relevant section below:

(see http://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Feeds)

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“Finding Your Feed URL
There are times when you want to tell someone your site’s feed address or URL, or you need it to submit it to search engines and directories, many of which now accept feed URL submissions. There are four possible URLs for each of your feeds. Any of these will work.

http://example.com/wp-rss.php
http://example.com/wp-rss2.php
http://example.com/wp-rdf.php
http://example.com/wp-atom.php

Or you can access them like this:

http://example.com/?feed=rss
http://example.com/?feed=rss2
http://example.com/?feed=rdf
http://example.com/?feed=atom

If you are using custom permalinks, you should be able to reach them through this usage:

http://example.com/feed/
http://example.com/feed/rss/
http://example.com/feed/rss2/
http://example.com/feed/rdf/

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Anyway, to cut the remainder of this story short, the second version of the second form worked for me, namely:

http://lollipop.wordpress.com/?feed=rss2

I still have no real idea why, or under what circumstances, the various forms work. But at least I’ve gotten it working once now

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