In this post, I’m going to share how I created the custom links back to my blog as seen in my syndicated posts on SQLServerPedia.com.

I’m syndicating my all of my SQL Server related posts over at SQLServerPedia.com. Since I sometimes blog about topics other than SQL Server, I didn’t want to syndicate my entire feed. Fortunately, WordPress creates feeds at the category level. Just add “/feed/” to the end of your category page URL to get to the category feed. The feed for my SQL Server related posts was located at http://robboek.com/category/sql-server/feed/.

With the category feed URL in hand, I created a feed on FeedBurner that points to the category feed and is the feed I gave out for syndication. This enabled me to add special FeedFlare that only shows up on my syndicated posts.

Creating custom FeedFlare is easy. It’s just an XML file with some custom tags that you upload to your site. You then put the URL to the XML file in to FeedBurner to add your custom FeedFlare to your feed. For more information see the FeedFlare Developer Guide.

I created two FeedFlare units. The first just adds “Originally posted at robboek.com” and links to my blog. The second is a permalink to the original blog post.

robboek-com.xml

<FeedFlareUnit>
    <Catalog>
        <Title>robboek.com</Title>
	<Description>Originally posted at robboek.com</Description>
    </Catalog>
    <FeedFlare>
        <Text>Originally posted at robboek.com</Text>
        <Link href="http://robboek.com" />
    </FeedFlare>
</FeedFlareUnit>

post-permalink.xml

<FeedFlareUnit>
    <Catalog>
        <Title>Permalink</Title>
        <Description>Adds the permalink of posts to help verify as the original source</Description>
    </Catalog>
    <FeedFlare>
        <Text>Permalink: ${link}</Text>
        <Link href="${link}" />
    </FeedFlare>
</FeedFlareUnit>