Playing with FeedBurner
August 7, 2005
Hi everyone, I’ve been playing around with FeedBurner. Sorry if it’s messing anything up in your aggregator. At Adam‘s suggestion, I started poking around with FeedBurner and I’m finding that it’s pretty cool. Here are some things that I love about FeedBurner:
- Feed stats! FeedBurner has a good set of stats that they provide for free and even more stats that you can get with a “Pro” account.
- Feed translation – they’ll take your feed and translate it to all different versions of Atom and RSS.
- Easy portability. All the subscribers on my FeedBurner feed will always get my blog feed no matter where it is. I can just change the URL behind my FeedBurner feed and my subscribers will be able to continue receiving my posts.
- Google AdSense ads! Apparently, FeedBurner is able to inject AdSense into your feed. Let’s see how well it works
The major problem is that it’s difficult to set up redirects from existing feed URLs to the new FeedBurner URL. There’s some help out there, but I might have to mess with it a little bit to get it right. Ah, I wish FeedBurner would make a WordPress plug-in that would make it easy
Oh, my new FeedBurner feed is at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/plaxoed
August 7, 2005 at 2:17 pm
I’m not sure how to inject this into the wordpress stuff, but here’s a PHP script that will permanantly redirect to feedburner.
August 7, 2005 at 2:19 pm
or… there would have been, if wordpress didn’t strip out the php script
<?php
if (!headers_sent()) {
header("HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently");
header("Location: http://feeds.feedburner.com/plaxoed");
}
?>
August 7, 2005 at 2:37 pm
Oooo thanks Spyder! Will this totally mess with aggreagtors though? Do most popular aggreagtors handle 301s correctly?
August 7, 2005 at 7:16 pm
Glad it’s working out for you
. It’ll be interesting to see if you find the stats surprising or revealing (“Wow, I didn’t know people were clicking on THAT item so much…”)
August 8, 2005 at 2:22 am
Mark,
there is a WordPress Feedburner plugin available at http://www.orderedlist.com/articles/wordpress_feedburner_plugin/ which does the redirection for you – no-one needs to update their feeds and you still get the stats!
Tom