BlogNetNews.com is getting ready to add a new feature to their website especially for homeschooling blogs. It will be similar to the community pages over at Truth Laid Bear, with the exception that these pages are actually working. (Hey! TTLB is working again, too, even if it still only reads some of the feeds!) Here is a sample of what the page will look like (this is the parenting section).

Network members will have their blog linked in the right sidebar, with an excerpt from the feed posted in the middle. The left sidebar gives readers some overview information about some of the more popular items and subscription options.

If you would like to be included, please leave a comment. If you fill in your url and email in the comment form, there is no need to repost it in the comment itself. If you know anyone else who might be interested, please let them know! I need to get an initial list together and then it will take about a week for the administrator to build the page for us.

There are not really any rules other than your blog needs to be homeschol related. If you are not sure it really does, you can look around the website and find a community that suits your blog better.

Updated to clarify: You do not have to post the feed in your sidebar, so there is no need to worry about the material posted.  When everything is set up, I may send out an email to everyone who asked to join with options to link, but from what I can tell, this is voluntary.  These are the rules as set up by BNN, which may affect some:

Blogs must be at least 90 days old before they are eligible to join. Participation in “Pay-per-Post” and other undisclosed advertising is grounds for removal from BNN.

That bit about Pay-per-Post is important since I know many homeschool blogs participate in that.  I’m sorry I didn’t post it in the original entry.

[tags]homeschool, homeschooling[/tags]

What is a feed?

Essentially, it is an easy way for people to keep up with your content, along with the 1000 other blogs they read. You likely already have one. And if you have readers, you likely already have a subscriber or two. That largely depends on your audience’s familiarity with blogging.

How do I find out what my feed is?

For Blogspot users, it should be one of the following:

http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default
http://yourblogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

Substituting “yourblogname” for your blog’s name. (Mine is gottsegnet, not Principled Discovery, for example. You need to look at the url.)

If not, somewhere in your sidebar, you likely have something that says, “Subscribe” or “RSS” or something of that nature. If you right click that, you should be able to copy your current feed to run through FeedBurner. If you cannot find that, you can also sign up with a feedreader such as Bloglines and just subscribe to your blog. It will tell you the feeds available in the subscription process.

So if I have a feed, why FeedBurner?

FeedBurner gives you a variety of information that you cannot find out by other means. If you publish a feed through FeedBurner AND redirect your feed through it you will have access about your feeds “health.” Some things you can do with FeedBurner:

Find out how many subscribers you have. Actually, FeedBurner does not actually know how many people have subscribed, but it does know how many people have accessed your feed. So you could have 300 people subscribing to your blog, but if only 30 people open up their feed reader and take a look at your content, FeedBurner will show 30 subscribers. Thus the number fluctuates and generally drops off on the weekend.

Once you know that, you have the option of publicizing that in your sidebar.

Find out how many of your readers click through to your site.

Create a headline animator for your blog. This rotates the last few titles in your blog and you can put it in a sidebar and, depending on your email provider, use it as an email signature.

Set up a form for email subscribers. I have two since setting mine up. One is me. Yeah!

Or, if you are weird like me, it is just sort of fun to play around with all this stuff.

How do I sign up?

Go to FeedBurner. In the upper right hand corner should be a little button that says Sign in or Register. You want to register. From there, just follow the directions. Once you sign up, it will give you a screen that says, “Burn a feed this instant” and a box to insert your current feed address. Follow those directions and that is all you need to do to burn a feed. It is also all you need to join the Homeschool Network. But there are so many other neat things to do with FeedBurner, you may as well begin tinkering around.

So how do I redirect my feed?

Since Google took over FeedBurner (and already owns Blogger) this is amazingly simple for Blogspot users.

1. Log in to your blog.
2. Choose “Settings” from your Dashboard.
3. Choose “Site Feed.”
4. Find where it says, “Post Feed Redirect URL.”
5. Insert your FeedBurner feed.
6. Remember to save your settings and Blogger should do the rest.

It will take 24 hours before anything shows up, but then you should have an estimate of how many subscribers you have.

If you are not on Blogger, you will have to get into your code. I will do this for HSB later and post instructions once I figure it out. Or if one of you HSB users has already done so, let me know. I can either post the instructions or provide a link to your post on the subject. Same for Homeschool Journal.

If you are using another popular platform, once you log in you can visit the forums. Type “redirect” in the search bar and you will be provided a number of discussions on the topic.

If you have any other questions…

Please ask. I will try to answer them here in the comments or as an update to the post to benefit everyone. Once you figure it out, you will wonder why it was so confusing to begin with, but we all start somewhere. Don’t think your question is too simple.

Essentially, this will pull all member feeds into one place. Here is the page for the Homeschooling Network, but at the moment, I am the only one there. Here is the Family Friendly Network so you can see what the page looks like when there is more than one member.

There are a number of advantages to this network, I believe. The page will allow interested readers to peruse a number of posts from the homeschooling community quickly and you can subscribe to the network’s feed to have that delivered straight to your feed reader. You can also download all member feeds as an opml file if you desire.

When you accept the invitation, you will be asked if you are interested in hosting advertising in your feed, which is purely optional. That may be an advantage to some, and a non-issue for others.

Qualifications:

1) Your blog must be a “homeschooling blog.” That does not mean that everything you write about has to be about homeschooling, but readers should be able to tell you homeschool.

2) Your blog must be family-friendly. That means no pornography or profanity.

That is all I can think of. I would like this network to be about promoting homeschooling, not necessarily any one view of homeschooling. Whether you homeschool for religious or secular reasons is not an issue.

All I need to know is that a) you are interested and b) your email address. Then I can send you an invitation and you can sign up.

If you do not have an account with FeedBurner, I can try to help you through setting one up. It really is pretty self-explanatory, but if you have any questions at all, please ask! Then you can stick this in your sidebar, if you want: