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Blog under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License
Jun
10
(2007)
Blog now FeedBurner-powered
Filed under: Uncategorized. Tags: blog, feedburner, rss.
I just enabled FeedBurner caching/serving of my blog’s RSS feed. The goal is to dramatically decrease the load on the server by redirecting RSS requests through FeedBurner’s server rather than mine (well, Dreamhost’s). Google just bought FeedBurner, so they’re not going anywhere. I’m trusting in Google not to do anything evil. I can always pull the plug on them and take control of the feed if needed.
Another bonus (for me, anyway) is an estimate of stats – how many folks are subscribed to the feed. That’s always been a total crap shoot, with nothing more than edumacated guesses and darkened dartboards providing numbers. Now I might get a better idea, and am braced for the emphatic “5 subscribers” that it will be flashing at me shortly.
I apologize in advance for any RSS noise as this kicks in. Hopefully it won’t republish all posts in the feed, but if it does, “mark all as read” or in Google Reader parlance “shift+a”.
Hey, so I just did the same thing (I think the same day, but maybe I was just copying the cool kids again) and am just loving feedburner. I also kind of disliked subscribing to other people’s feeds who used feedburner in the past as it seemed it added yet another thing to fail, but now that I am using it myself I can see why people like it so much. Unlike the standard web stats tools, it is clearly built to analyze feed traffic, though I also turned on the clickthrough tracking (yet another link introduced in the chain of possible failures) and love the ability to see which things I’m blogging generate clickthrough interest. Very cool. Like you, I invite anyone who experiences a problem with my feed to let me know. I hope it ends up working ok ‘cos I’m liking the stats!
I was surprised at how seamlessly the transition was. I dropped in the WP plugin to redirect traffic to FeedBurner, and everything Just Worked. I didn’t even see duplicate posts, as I was expecting.
I had initially turned off link tracking, but will try it for a few days.
For some bizarre reason, Thunderbird doesn’t seem to like the change — every time it tries to get new articles, it just grabs the latest 10 without checking to see if they’re actually new or not.
@Tim: that’s bizarre. sorry for the noise! I’ll check into it asap.