WordPress themes with optional eMail subscription links integrated into them require you to enter your FeedBurner IDs. Read no further if you already use FeedBurner and know your FeedBurner ID. If not…

How do I ?

• You have to sign-up for a FeedBurner account first.
• After you’ve signed-up and are logged in, you’ll have to create a feed (burn a feed). You can create any number of feeds. Each of those feeds will have a unique ID.
• After you’re done creating a feed, if you click on it, you’ll be taken to that particular feed’s settings panel.
• While you’re there, activate the ‘email subscriptions’ service in your feed settings panel (it’s under the ‘publicize’ tab) to provide your readers with email updates.

Now, all the while you were browsing through your feed’s settings panel, if you look in your browser’s address bar, you’ll find the URLs ending with a number (…?id=xxxxxxx). Yes, that is your FeedBurner ID for that particular feed.

What the bleep is a Feed?

If you have no clue what a feed is, here’s an excellent video by CommonCraft. You probably will not find a better & simpler explanation anywhere on the web. It gives you the all essential bigger picture which otherwise takes a considerable amount of time to see.

and why FeedBurner?

We have almost no control over our default WordPress feeds. FeedBurner is an advanced feed management service which lets us do a lot of things to the default feed. Here are a few.

• We can track the feed statistics.
• Create custom feed urls.
• We can include ads in our feeds as well.
• Place those ‘submit to’ links to social media sites.