Another Blogger tip

I have always wondered how many people were subscribed to my blog. Blogger has the feed option but it does not tell you anything about subscribers. Feedburner does but the problem is you have to burn your feed into a feedburner one and feedburner would give you stats on those who subscribe to the newly created feed.
Till recently, I had no way of knowing whether this blog was being regularly read by people or not (though I have had quite a number of people tell me that they read my blog and I have been plesantly surprised to know that :). As the beginning of the previous line suggests, I have been able to find a way get stats on the number of subscribers. I was messing around with my feed settings in blogger (my feed subscribers may have noticed those changes) and I found that blogger has introduced a new feature called feed redirect. I put in my feedburner feed in that box and overnight, I knew the number of subscribers to this blog...
If you want to exploit this feature, you can follow the steps in this tutorial.

Quick Blogger Tip..

Do you like the "Recent comments" feature that worpress provides but blogger does not?
Do you like sharing things from google reader but absolutely hate that their widget does not match your page style and sticks out like a sour thumb? Have you used Yahoo! Pipes and created some feeds that you wish you could display on your blog?

If so, fear not. This is a little tip that you will find useful if you like adding snippets of your feeds to your blog.

First, you need to be on Blogger 2.0. If you are still on the antiquated blogger platform, this will not work.

If you are already there, you will also need to upgrade to the new layouts manager.

Ok, let us suppose you are already there and I am just wasting your time.

Now, click on the "Add new page element" that you can see there in the layout manager. This will open a popup. fear not, this is not an ad that will tell you that your system is infected with viruses and you need to download a software to clean the system! This is just blogger's way of presenting an UI to you to add a little box in your sidebar. Do not get overwhelmed by all those options in this little window. Stay calm and you might notice that there is one heading called "Feed" and it has a blue "Add to blog" button underneath it. Click that one! This will take you another page which would have a textbox in it. Now all you need to do is add the feed url that you want to share with your readers.
If you want the cool "Recent comments" box, just like the one you see on this blog, just put in "http://{your-blog}.blogspot.com/feeds/comments/default" in the box.
If you want to add your google reader share, find the link for rss feed for your shared items and key in that url in the text box. If you want both, repeat the process twice, once with your comments feed and once with your google reader share feed.

Have fun.