Wednesday, February 8, 2017

How To Hiding "Subscribe to Post (Atom)" at the bottom of your blog

Where does "Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)" come from?

By default, Blogger puts the "Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)" item on at the bottom of every screen of posts in blogs with Layout or Designer templates (ref What type of template does my blog have?).

This is useful for readers who understand what it means:  it lets them subscribe to an RSS feed of your blog - and even if you don't personally use it, RSS is important for bloggers.  However:
  • Some readers won't understand what it means,
  • If you're showing a "blog-site" (ie a website created with blogging tools, rather than a classic blog), the command doesn't make sense, even though the idea of RSS subscription does
  • It looks ugly, and
  • RSS-savvy readers who aren't Blogger users generally look for the little orange square with radar bars, rather than an obscure, Blogger-specific, description of the link.

So you may want to remove it from your blog and replace it with a nicer-looking RSS-subscription button.


How to remove "Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)" from your blog:

1  Edit your template

2  Find this code in your template:
<!-- feed links-->
<b:include name='feedLinks'/>
3  Replace it with this code:
<!-- feed links
<b:include name='feedLinks'/>   -->

What you have done is to comment-out the code:  the "-->" is the "end of comment" command in HTML.

This approach is better than "hiding" the link by making it the same colour as your background (which could be seen as trying to hide things from the search-engines).  It won't have any negative effect on your blog's performance, and you can undo it very easily by moving the end-of-comment text back again.

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