PandaPassport.com – China Blog

Considering the trouble feedburner is supposedly giving to China Telecom users, I thought I’d take the feedburner graphics off my site in an effort to make sure the page loads well for everyone who reads it.

Don’t listen to the recent reports which say all feeds are blocked in China. It’s all hearsay, and none of them seem to have noticed what people inside of China are saying (i.e. the links above Re: China Telecom).

In any case, I decided to give feedsky a go. Because if big tech websites like arstechnica and techcrunch can’t figure out what’s going on with RSS feeds in China, how can you expect the average reader to know what to do?

I decided to make it simple for readers who want to subscribe:

Inside China? Use Feedsky (?)
Not in China? Use Feedburner

If you want to do the same, here’s the code for what I just did.
Inside China? Use <a href="http://feed.feedsky.com/YOUR_FEED">Feedsky</a> (<a href="http://www.pandapassport.com/web-20/how-to-set-up-feedsky-china/">?</a>)<br /> Not in China? Use <a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/YOUR-FEED">Feedburner</a>

For those of you who don’t know Feedsky, it’s a Chinese knockoff of Feedburner. I’ve been using it for about half a year now on my much neglected Chinese site, and it looks fine. For those of you who might require a little help navigating your way through setting up your feed in a second language (i.e. Chinese), here are a few step by step instructions:

UPDATE:

1. A big Thank you to Yee in who reports in the comments that Feedsky actually does have an English Interface for their site.
2. A big cao ni ma go out the guys at feedsky for making that English version of their site inaccessible from the site main page. And practically impossible to search via google. How can you not link to that shit with an English Version button in some corner?!!?!!

Fuck. Like, really…
I owe somebody a kick in the nads. I’m sending them an email right now!

Step 1 – Go to Feedsky.com and click REGISTER
Step 2 – Input Email, login name, and password
Step 3 – Input your website’s url
Step 4 – Write some details about your feed
The interesting part here is that you can tag your feed in with english words or Chinese characters. Not sure if this will drive traffic to your site among people who browse it on feedsky, but it might be worth throwing in some tags here.
Step 5 – Feed Successfully Burned!
Now move on to FEED MANAGEMENT
Step 6 – Choose some neato Feedsky Icons
Personally, I’m not big on these icons, so I chose a big blue icon from here.
Step 7 – Not really a step, but check this feature:
Feedsky allows you to see the email addresses of people who’ve subscribed to your feed. To my knowledge, feedburner does not do that.

Anyway, there ya go. That’s it. I thought I’d document the process as I went through for the benefit of anyone else here in China that might want to do the same for their site.

I should also point out that on Step 6, I also grabbed the code for an email subscription form. While it does have Chinese characters on it, I thought I’d bi-lingualacize it by adding “Enter your Email Address:” just above it.

Hope that helps!