Overview

If you own a blog that publishes Gluten-Free, Celiac, or related news, stories, and information that you would like to share with others, our news-aggregator can help you reach more of your intended audience. Have you ever noticed how a few of the more "well known" or "big name" blogs and news-sources tend to dominate the field? Well, the reason the "Big Name" blogs get more coverage is in part due to how Google ranks those sites and publishes their news into a standard feed (which our News-Aggregator automatically gets).

For smaller, lesser-traffic blogs that Google otherwise overlooks, we can make sure your content gets equal press by pulling your blog-data directly.  But, to do this, you need to configure you Blog to publish what's called an RSS feed that our News Aggregator can automatically pull information from when you publish new stories.

This document will walk you through the steps you'll need to take in order to make sure your blog entries show up on the GF/Celiac News Aggregator site along with all the "bigger name" blogs that automatically make it into our news at: http://www.suretalent-books/Gluten-Free-News.aspx

1. Log into Blogger as you always do.
2. From your Blogger Dashboard, Go to "Settings", and then to the "Site Feed" sub-tab.
3. You should see a dropdown labeled "Allow Blog Feed".  Choose "Full" from the dropdown, and then click the big red "Save Settings" button toward the bottom of the screen.

Just send me an Email (mikeeberhart [AT] gmail [DOTCOM]) when you are done. Include the following:

1. Your name,
2. Your Blogger web-address / URL.

IMPORTANT NOTES and Known Limitations:

• Although most people that contact me for inclusion in the gluten-free news have been courteous and reciprocated with a link from their own site to the gluten-free news aggregation page (i.e., http://gluten-free-desserts.com/Gluten-Free-News.aspx) or to my Gluten-Free Blog (i.e., http://gluten-free-blog.blogspot.com/), others have not (whether for lack of knowing how, oversight, or whatever). As such, I am now requesting people have a link to one of these sites so others have the same chance to find this resource BEFORE I setup a feed.
• There are some limitations with the current RSS feed-pulling code. If you have a custom domain that you host your blog from, there is a fair chance that the aggregator will not be able to pull directly from your site (if you have a secondary RSS feed location, like feedburner or something, perhaps it will work. Standard Blogger blogs (i.e., blog-name.blogspot.com) and other hosted WordPress blogs and the like all appear to work fine.
• If you have not hear back from me (via Email) in a week or so after a setup request, please drop me another email. I have noticed more than a few setup requests were getting filtered by Gmail as "SPAM", and I have certainly missed some - sorry.
  So, I have setup a filter recently (2008-12-12) to always allow the subject "NEWS-AGGREGATOR-SETUP-REQUEST" through no matter what (no quotes - just copy/paste the value in the quotes as your email-subject). Should this keyword become abused by SPAM somehow, I will simply change it to a new value here.
• If a blog's content is reported as offensive, such claims will be be reviewed, and upon confirmation of objectionable material, will be immediately removed from the aggregator feeds.
• If a blog's content evolves into unrelated content (i.e., not wheat-free, celiac, gluten-free, and related diet topics) or is nothing more than an advertising site or "keyword SPAM" site, that site will be removed from the list of feeds.
• Finally, I have noticed that, although people start out with good intentions to write blog entries regularly, quite a few of the feeds I end up setting up become inactive within just a few short months. I will perform periodic reviews of all feed sites, and if there is no activity (i.e., blog postings) at your feed site for a couple months, the blog will be removed from my feeds-list. I do this because it otherwise causes serious processing delays as my software looks for blog entries that do not exist. And, if your feed site URL changes or is unreachable for more than a week, I will remove the feed-link too, because this greatly hampers my program.

So, here's to Blog-Publishing Democracy where everyone with a Gluten-Free Blog can get equal access to readers!  :)
Be kind and courteous on your blogs, and please link back to this resource.
Regards,

Mike

PS: Email with any questions and I'll try to help you through setup if needed.