Blogger: how to add email address to feed

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How do you include your email address in your feed, if you're using Blogger? (See my intro to feeds for beginners if you're new to feeds.)

THE QUICKIE

To show your proper email address in your feed (as opposed to noreply@blogger.com), in your Blogger profile tick "Show my email address", save - and your feed will thereafter display the email address entered in your profile's Identity section.

THE LONG & SLOW

Your blog's feed can potentially list your email address. That can be useful for things like Feedburner's FeedFlare, which lets you add an "Email The Author" link to each post in your feed (as opposed to your blog webpage) so that a feed subscriber can click the link to, you guessed it, send you an email.

But previously, there was no point in Blogger authors activating "Email The Author" in FeedFlare, because any attempt to do so only sent subscribers' attempted emails to the black hole that is "noreply@blogger.com" (and it certainly won't reach you!):


However, a recent upgrade to Blogger ("Blog feeds optionally include your email address") means that you can now display your correct email details in your feed, and even add "Email The Author" links to your Feedburner feed if you want to (but there are downsides, as I'll come to).

It's optional. So, how do you take up the option to include your email address in your feed?

How to display your email address in your feed

1. Sign in to the Blogger Dashboard.
2. Click "Edit Profile" on the right.
3. Under Privacy, tick "Show my email address" - this means whatever email address is entered in the following Identity section of your profile will be used:
4. Scroll to the end and click "Save Profile".

This adds your email address to your feed behind the scenes:

How to activate Email The Author in FeedFlare

1. Sign in to your Feedburner account.
2. Click the name of the feed you want to add the links to,
3. Click the Optimize tab.
4. Click FeedFlare on the left.
5. Against "Email The Author", tick the "Feed" column:
   
   
   (you can tick the box under the "Site" column too if you display FeedFlares on your blog webpage and want the email links to be visible there, but you may not need to if you're on Blogger as choosing to show your email address will display it in your Blogger profile, which can be reached through your sidebar if you've chosen to display your profile.)
   
   
6. Scroll to the end, click Save or Activate.

Then, in your Feedburner feed you'll see a new "Email The Author" link:

- and subscribers can click it to email you:

What's the downside?

The way Blogger have currently set it up, it's all or nothing: if you tick the box to show your email address, then your email address also shows on your profile page (when you click View from the Dashboard, or the "View my complete profile" link from your blog sidebar), not in just your feed:



Now I do give my email address in my blog sidebar anyway, but I've done it in such a way that (hopefully!) spammers can't harvest it. The way the email address is displayed in your Blogger profile makes it much easier for spambots to grab your address. UPDATE: it's entirely my bad, Team Blogger are entitled to one free spanking (just one, mind!) - Blogger do obfuscate the email address with Javascript, adding extra stuff to the address to fool the spambots; a dedicated spammer could theoretically figure out exactly what they're doing and strip out the extra bits, but they would have to be targeting just Blogger profile addresses, which seems unlikely.

Personally I'd have preferred it if Blogger had provided a new section in the Edit Profile page where you could fill in an email address just for the purposes of displaying it in your feed, but could choose not have it displayed in your Blogger profile (if you wanted that).

Also, if you have more than one Blogger blog, there's no ability to display a different email address for each blog - you have to use the same email address for all of them.

So, I've not ticked that box in my Blogger profile, myself - but of course, it's up to you what you want to do for your own blog.

PS. of the other new Blogger features, I can say "Bagus, terima kasih Team Blogger!" but I've absolultely no idea what "spam interstitials" are. Can anyone please enlighten me?

Tags: blogging, email address, FeedFlare, Improbulus, A Consuming Experience