Low impact RSS Feed and Email Newsletter Using DS-Syndicate, FeedBurner and Feedblitz

Would you like to add an RSS and/or Email Newsletter to your website?  This tip tells you how to do it while keeping the load on your site low and giving you readership statistics.

Here is a relatively (compared to the alternative of coding it!) quick and easy way to setup your CB site to have both an RSS feed and an email newsletter.

Obviously the YaNC plug-in for CB is the way to go if you are looking for a complete newsletter solution - but here are some benefits to using the solution proposed here:

1. No server load for RSS feeds.  Feedburner grabs your feed once every 30 minutes and then everyone uses feedburner's cache to load your feed as often as they configure it in their reader / aggregator.
2. No server load for mailings. Feedblitz turns any feed into a email newsletter - it handles all subscription, mailing and bounce management.  Feedblitz does give you access to subscriber's email addresses.
3. Feedburner allows overriding and correction of many typical feed formation errors or fields - for instance, wrong MIME document type and feed name and description.
4. Feedburner gives statistics on how many people are reading your feed directly and via email at Feedblitz.com and which articles are getting clicked.

Here are some tricks that this article uses that may not be immediately evident if you are engrossed in following the instructions:

1. The real feed URL on your site is never exposed to visitors.
2. You can place the feed URL on your site as a redirect to the feedburner feed URL so that if you ever change your approach to feeds (change them to be provided locally or through another service), none of your visitors has to discover the new URL by the old one going dead.
3. You can password protect your feed using Feedburner - something you cannot do with an existing Joomla solution.
4. This solution uses a basic RSS Syndication component so that you can publish any category on your site as a feed (DS-Syndicate)
5. You can use Feedburner to override the Feed desription - something DS-Syndicate does not let you fully control.
6. You can emulate a "Newsletter" by creating a non-public section and category and publishing an article which (manually) rolls up content from various site areas when you want the Newsletter to "go live" (within 30 minutes for RSS, 1AM the next morning for email subscriptions).  Since DS-Syndicate is a simple implementation it does not pay attention to security or whether the content even has a page where it can be viewed.  You can optionally point DS-Syndicate at an existing site news category that is visible - however, you must remember that anytime you publish an item to the category it is immediately available on RSS and will be emailed the next day to anyone email subscribed - if you frequently publish, it could be taken as spam by those subscribed via email.
7. Because DS-Syndicate does (thankfully) pay attention to the "published" attribute of a news item, you can prepare one or more "drafts" before sending.
8. There is no way to secure a feed or email subscription to one to just registered users.  There are several ways to compensate for this.  First, make the feed URL, username and password obscure and long so they must be copied and pasted from a registered user webpage.  Second, users will have to click and go to your website to read the "Main Text" field of your content item.  So make sure you don't include any private or value add content in the "Intro Text" field of content items being posed to the RSS enabled category.
9. On Feedblitz, you can only customize / brand the email if you pay for a premium account. (possible major downside compared to YaNC).
10. If you do not wish to provide RSS, but just email subscribes - then do not let anyone know your RSS feed URL - feedblitz does not expose it.  You can either point feedblitz directly at your DS-Syndicate feed or you can create a Feedburner feed for: a) statistics, b) future flexibility to allow RSS feed access.

Instructions:

1. Install the DS-Syndicate component and module.  You can download it here: http://forge.joomla.org/sf/projects/ds_syndicate (I used 0.5b - not sure if the latest will work)
2. If you wish to have a "Newsletter" type publishing scheme, create a section and/or category that does not show anywhere on your site - if you use spaces in your category name you will need to convert them to %20 for feedburner - I kept it simple and just didn't use spaces.
3. Use the DS-Syndicate module to create (or actually "see") the feed URL.  Make sure to turn on HTML display if you want your feed to contain clickable links, etc.  Once you've copied the URL, turn the module off - you won't need to use it.  It will be something like http://yoursite.com/index2.php?option=com_ds-syndicate&type=RSS&no_html=1&cat=NameOfNonPublicCategory
4. Using this feed URL "Burn the Feed" by creating an account at http://feedburner.com/.  If you wish to use a "redirected" URL on your site for this feed, I would suggest you make the Feedburner URL something very difficult to manually key in, like http://feeds.feedburner.com/dkadh6323ksf9y32hf9d
5. If you wish the feed to be secure, configure a username and password on the Feed Burner.  If your feed / email is intended to be for registered members only, then make these extremely obscure and/or long so they must be copied and pasted off a page on your site.
6. On your website create a redirected URL to the FeedBurner URL.  If your feed / email is intended to be for registered members only, then make your URL obscure as well.  For example: http://yoursite.com/dahoiadfj redirects to the password protected feed http://feeds.feedburner.com/dkadh6323ksf9y32hf9d which is sourcing information from the hidden feed: http://yoursite.com/index2.php?option=com_ds-syndicate&type=RSS&no_html=1&cat=NameOfNonPublicCategory
7. On Feedblitz syndicate your feed for email subscription (there are many options, too numerous to discuss) - point it at your FeedBurner.com feed - give it the password if you have used one.
8. Optionally, use Feedblitz to create a form for email subscription.
9. Upload the form to your site if you are using it.
10. On your site create a content item (probably static) with an iframe that points either directly to the URL on Feedblitz that allows subscribes to your feed, or to your locally uploaded form.  Depending on the embedded HTML editor your Joomla site uses, IFRAME tags may be stripped out. You can temporarily turn off your HTML editor when preparing this document so that this does not happen.  IFRAME added by end users could be bad, so it is probably best to NOT configure your editor to allow them just so you can create this one content item.  You must use an IFRAME because the Feedblitz site recently added image verification (type in some obscured characters to confirm a form submission) so it brings up a second confirmation page even if you use the custom form.
11. The same content item can outline details about how to add the feed to a feed reader if desired.

With this configuration I now have a relatively secure RSS Feed and email newsletter subscription that is low impact on my site resources, has statistics

Now we just need lists to be able to be RSS Feeds  :)

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