Claiming your WordPress blog in Bloglines
After having claimed my blog in Technorati (see previous post) I thought I’d try to do the same in Bloglines. They have a completely different way of verifying ownership.
They require you to add a hidden tag to your blog template and in one of your blog posts. They tell you what to add but they don’t explain how to do it. A search on Google reveals that a lot of people with self-hosted WordPress blogs seem to be finding it very hard to claim their blogs.
Due to the lack of instructions I made a guess at what to do and managed to get my blog claimed first time. Maybe I’m just lucky! :) This is what I did. Note that these instruction are for self-hosted WordPress blogs and may not apply for other blog platforms or for blogs hosted on the WordPress site.
In the Publisher Tools section of my account on Bloglines I went through the basic steps of adding my blog URL until I got to the page giving the claim tags. As you can see the page gives no clues as to how you are supposed to apply the tags to your blog.
I use the Default theme on my site so I edited the header.php which lives here:
\wp-content\themes\default\header.php
If you use a different theme you should modify the equivalent page in your theme.
I added the tag in the <head></head> section of the site as this tag isn’t designed to be viewed. You could probably add it anywhere in the <head></head> but here is where I added my tag.
<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml"
title="<?php bloginfo('name'); ?> RSS Feed"
href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />
<link rel="pingback"
href="<?php bloginfo('pingback_url'); ?>" />
<!-- ukey="3064F3CF" -->
<style type="text/css" media="screen">
Then I went into the Manage section of my WordPress control panel and edited the latest post using the non-WYSIWYG plain text editor. I inserted the blog tag at the very top of this post. This tag is non-viewable so you don’t need to worry about anyone seeing it.
After doing this I went back to Bloglines and pressed the button to verify my claim. And it worked!
Tags: bloglines, claim blog, claiming, wordpress
