Feedburning

Turns out I’m not the only one who’s been thinking about XML syndication feeds, publishing redundancy, and how we link to those feeds. Dan Cederholm was wondering last week why we still support multiple feed formats. A few weeks before, Molly Holzschlag surveyed a few sites to determine how they link to respective feeds, and where those links are located on the page.

I’ve grown tired of the need to choose which formats I support (between Atom and multiple versions of RSS). I’m not about to join the debate over which format is better. I simply don’t care. I acknowledge that RSS/Atom syndication is an important technology that has changed the way we distribute and access information. But my decision to publish a feed shouldn’t be complicated by which format or how many of them I publish just to ensure I cover all possible bases.

A solution

Enter Feedburner. Although I’m a little late in discovering the benefits of this extremely simple service, I don’t think there’s any harm in directing a few more bloggers and publishers toward Feedburner. It’s amazing how simple it is to start using this feed conversion service.

The geek scale on this topic is a little high, but I’m sold on what Feedburner provides. It removes the previous choice I had to make about which formats to publish — I only need to publish one format. Feedburner takes that format and (via its SmartFeedâ„¢ option) automatically makes my feed available in virtually any format required by modern news readers.

The site covers the basic benefits of Feedburner. In addition to the SmartFeed option, I was particularly interested in the stats collected on my feeds, and the browser-friendly format if someone clicks on one of my feed links.

Additional benefits

To expand on Feedburner’s listed benefits, there are a few others if you follow the steps to ensure all currently subscribed users automatically start pulling down the new Feedburner feed. Those steps are detailed in a forum post: Pointing an existing feed URL at your new FeedBurner URL.

Rather than using the Apache Redirect from step 3, I chose to use the mod_rewrite directives suggested by “adrian” a few responses down in that forum thread. I’m pointing users to a non-existent file (e.g. index.xml). Then I catch requests for that file (as well as all the old feed URLs) with the mod_rewrite rules that redirect to my Feedburner feed. A few lines from my .htaccess file look like this:

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner

RewriteRule ^atom\.xml$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/stopdesign [R,L]

RewriteRule ^index\.rdf$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/stopdesign [R,L]

RewriteRule ^index\.xml$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/stopdesign [R,L]

This method provides two levels of abstraction that give me the greatest flexibility in continuing to provide feeds into the future. By pointing Feedburner to a private URL for the source feed, I have the freedom to change the source feed format at any time without disrupting current subscriptions. I can also change the location of my private source feed anytime by simply updating Feedburner settings to use a new source feed URL.

The second level of abstraction comes in by continuing to point subscribers to a virtual feed location on my own site, rather than pointing directly to the new Feedburner location. Since requests for local feeds get handled by mod_rewrite, I can redirect those requests anywhere I want. Handy if Feedburner were to ever cease to exist, or if I decided to use some other service to provide my feeds. By preventing new subscribers from using Feedburner URLs to subscribe to my feeds, I get a small insurance policy that helps avoid service lock-in.

Another benefit of Feedburner is the bandwidth saved by not serving up your own feeds. This savings could be significant to sites with high subscription volumes, especially if their feeds provide the full text of each news item.

The ability to splice photo and link feeds together with a main feed could save some folks a lot of MT plugin work. Others might take advantage of automatic Amazon Associate link insertions. From a standards perspective, I can now publish once, and Feedburner takes care of the rest. Feedburner also needs valid XML. Before your new feed can be activated, Feedburner validates each feed — badly formed XML might trip up some news readers, so it’s good to know if your original feed contains any invalid XML.

Leave the complexity to someone else

I don’t think Feedburner will go away anytime soon. Hopefully its new funding will enable more improvement of feature offerings and continued interoperability with future formats, such as mobile syndication. Feedburner is in a pretty good position to help publishers easily manage the complexity around feed formats and options.

If you publish some form of syndication feed, but haven’t checked out Feedburner, go do it whenever you have a few minutes. The account creation process is an extremely simple 1-page form. You’ll simplify your feed publishing choices, while remaining confident that your readers can still easily subscribe or stay subscribed, no matter what application or device they use to do so.