Make Feedburner Work for you: A How-to and mini-review
As far as RSS goes, Feedburner is the hottest feed management technology. If you thought RSS was powerful before, it’s ten times as useful when powered by their propietary tracking and enhancement technologies. In this article, I am to show you how to convert your Wordpress feeds to work in Feedburner, and what value Feedburner adds to your site syndication.
Setting it up:
Sign up for a Feedburner account. Then, when it prompts you for the RSS url, give it the Wordpress absolute path:
This should be the wp-rss2.php file in the root of your WP installation directory. Why do we do this? Because the next step is to forward our RSS readers from the blog to the URL which Feedburner gives us with Apache mod_rewrite. When we do this, if told Feedburner to poll mysite.com/feed/ and mysite.com/feed/ to redirect to Feedburner, we’d have a recursive loop!
Now we just accept the title and url if they look ok, and activate our account:
Now you’ll see that they’ve given us the URL feeds.feedburner.com/VioxxNews . We want to set up our site to forward here, so go to the .htaccess file in the root of your Wordpress installation, and look for two lines that look like:
RewriteRule ^feed/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /index.php?&feed=$1 [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /index.php?&feed=$1 [QSA,L]
These two rules take requests for your feed, and send them to the real file. However, we’re using Feedburner now, so we need to change these to:
RewriteRule ^feed/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/VioxxNews [QSA,L]
RewriteRule ^(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/VioxxNews [QSA,L]
Now all requests for old feeds will be shunted through Feedburner! You should also add this ABOVE the # BEGIN WordPress block so that Wordpress doesn’t overwrite your rules with its own. Since yours are higher up, they’ll take precedence.
Adding value:
Now that we have Feedburner handling our rss/atom/rdf/xml feeds, we can leverage the best of its services to improve the quality of our syndication. Click on “Skip directly to feed management” to start! The first thing you want to enable is SmartFeed, under the Optimize tab:
Now your feed will automatically detect the type of agent visiting it and adjust its format between RSS and ATOM depending on its preferences and needs. This means that with one feed you can leverage a multi-format audience. Now there’s no distinction between RSS and ATOM readers: you just have a single XML feed.
Now go to the Publish tab, where we can add Pingshot–automatic pinging for your posts:
Everytime your RSS changes, you’ll send out pings. While this might seem a little spammy to me, it’s also a great idea to make sure ping services are getting notified about your content. The other cool Publicity tool to activate is the Feedcount widget:
Which will give you a publicity button like:
Discovering your feeds:
Feedburner also provides a number of tools to pry deep into the guts of your feeds, which fall under the “Analyse” tab of their administrative interface. Feed circulation gives the number of readers polling your feeds:
If you want more useful information, you should check out the Readership details:
Here you’ll see how many of your RSS hits are from real readers, search engines like IceRocket and Technorati, from spammers and scrapers, or other sources. This, in my opinion, is FeedBurner’s most powerful feature–the ability to satisfy curiousity about Feed membership. It’s easy to write a script to look for requests per day to /feed/, but that’s a lot more effort than just setting up FeedBurner and letting it do it’s thing.
Next steps:
If you’re a podcaster, FeedBurner will automatically do enclosures and make sure all the content types are correct. If you’re a big linker or big on Flickr, FeedBurner can splice your del.ic.ious feed into your blog feed, or splice in your photos. You can geotag, automatically add ticker symbols, create summary text, add a creative commons license, or adsense advertisments. If you can think of something to do to your feed, chances are Feedburner will help you get there.
Conclusion:
When I started using Feedburner, it was just for the tracking capabilities it has. But, I found a number of common useful options I’ve outlined about that add substantial value to your feed serving. In that regard, Feedburner adds more than just statistics and tracking. And, there are no competitors in its space. While every thing it does is relatively simple, it does a lot of them providing end-to-end RSS/ATOM/RDF/XML solutions for bloggers.
| This entry was posted on Thursday, November 24th, 2005 at 9:29 am and is tagged with enhancement technologies, recursive loop, feed management, qsa, absolute path, installation directory, management technology, htaccess file, rdf, feedburner, precedence, wordpress, atom, wp, syndication, apache, blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback. |
7 Responses to “Make Feedburner Work for you: A How-to and mini-review”
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In my opinion, Feedburner is just ****. It takes ages to load if i read a blog through feedburner.. and i don’t really see advantages except that people with stats checking addiction are satisfied..
FeedBurner is the bomb, if only for the abstration layer it provides between the “real” and “consumed” feeds. I’m switching blogging platforms, and since I published a FeedBurner feed as my main site feed many moons ago, I can make the transition seamless for my RSS subscribers.
I’m having trouble with the implementation as documented here. I have two thoughts… one, since I’m hosted on Windows/IIS 6, I don’t think any of the references to the .htaccess file apply. Could you clarify whether your docs are for a non-Windows server/Apache-only implementation?
And, I totally don’t get the requirement for the redirects… is it because the article assumes I had published another feed to the public, and I’m trying to deflect access to that feed over to the FeedBurner feed? Apologies in advance for any stupid question/comment…
Thanks,
Chris
[...] FeedBurnerIf you aren’t using FeedBurner yet, I suggest considering it ASAP. Besides comprehensive subscriber and circulation statistics even on the free package, it makes it easier for your readers to subscribe and adds some cool functionality to your feeds. For more details, here’s Elliot Back’s review of it. Note: If you’re using WordPress, I suggest getting the FeedBurner WP plugin too. [...]
I used FeedSmith to install Feedburner on my wordpress blog. It was straight forward. Can anyone enlighten me on the pros/cons of using FeedSmith as opposed to the procedure outlined in this article?
I appreciate the other suggestions in the article and I plan trying them out.
Thank you for this how-to guide. I think Feed Burner rocks!
Does Feedburner work to improve your site’s traffic? I’m kind fo concerned abt ppl paoching my articles and just posting them on their own Web site.