chrispederick.com

FeedBurner

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• 3 years ago on April 24, 2005

After tidying my feeds a couple of weeks ago a number of other people blogged about feeds, most notably Dan Cederholm, Paul Scrivens and Douglas Bowman. I was already considering taking a look at FeedBurner and after reading these posts I decided to check it out.

FeedBurner is a “service that allows publishers to enhance their feeds in a variety of interesting and powerful ways”. The two most useful features for me are SmartFeed - which “translates your feed on-the-fly into a format (RSS or Atom) compatible with your visitors’ feed reader application” - and the detailed statistics such as feed circulation, hits and clickthroughs.

Using FeedBurner

Using FeedBurner is as simple as:

1. Signing up for a free FeedBurner account.
2. Pointing FeedBurner at the feed you want it to handle.
3. Choosing which services you want to use on the feed.
4. Redirecting your existing subscribers to the new feed location at FeedBurner.

See Douglas’ post for a simple way to transparently redirect your existing subscribers.

The statistics that FeedBurner provides are interesting, giving me information about the number of subscribers, which feed readers they are using and how many people clickthrough to my site. For example, a third of the subscribers to my blog posts feed are using Firefox Live Bookmarks, closely followed by Bloglines.

In The Future

It will be interesting to see how FeedBurner expands it’s offerings now that it is fully financed. It looks like they are planning to offer premium services alongside the current free service and I would definitely consider paying for a premium membership if the extra features were compelling enough.

FeedBurner is in beta release, but appears to be very stable right now. However, let me know if you are seeing any problems with the feeds on this site.

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