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The Blogger Look

Because Blogger offers relatively few (but fairly attractive) templates, many blogs are instantly recognizable as belonging to Blogger. One example is “Blogging For Dummies” — hey, wait a minute! That’s not my blog. It belongs to Jeff Sievers, who started the blog as a how-to about blogging. It has more recently evolved into a general diary about everything from politics to the repeated breakdowns of Jeff’s car. I thought it would be fun to put his site in the book, and Jeff agreed. See it live, here:

drumacrat.blogspot.com

Jeff’s blog has the typical Blogger look; that template and similar ones with different colors are much in use. If you scroll down the page, you might notice that there is no visible feed link. The lack of a visible feed is another drawback to Blogger. However, Blogger uses a common feed link that you can simply add to the end of any blog’s home-page URL:

/atom.xml

Using Jeff Siever’s Blogger site as an example, the feed link is this:

drumacrat.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Blogger uses an alternative to the RSS feed format called Atom. Atom feeds work just like RSS feeds in the important ways. Atom feeds display blog entries just like RSS feeds in a feed newsreader. Blogger’s choice of Atom has nothing to do with the lack of a feed link on Blogger blogs. The missing feed link is simply a design choice at Blogger — inexplicable, perhaps, but there it is. If you use a feed-enabled Web browser (such as Firefox), Blogger feeds appear in the browser just as reliably as on pages that do contain feed links. Firefox finds the feed link in the page’s code, where it lurks invisibly.