Feedburner does provide a very useful service, but sending subscribers directly to the Feedburner feed is a mistake that many bloggers (including myself until recently) commit. By sending subscribers directly to the Feedburner feed I mean placing an RSS link on your website that points to “http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeed”.
Why is this a mistake? Because on this way the readers will not be subscribing to your feed but rather to the Feedburber burned feed of your blog. This means that a third party is in control of the subscribers. Should Feedburner break down or decide to charge money for the service on the future you will lose the subscribers.
A simple solution for this problem is to make readers subscribe to your feed (i.e. http://www.domain.com/feed/) and redirect them to Feedburner. There are several ways to create the redirect.
If you already have a .htaccess file on your server you can simply add this code (it works with /feed/, if you use /rss/ you will need to edit it):
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !feedburner [NC]
RewriteRule ^feed/?$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeed [R=302,L]
RewriteEngine Off
Alternatively you can use the Feedburner Replacement plugin that will redirect all your incoming feed requests from readers to the Feedburner feed.
Finally, if you do not want to redirect your readers but still want to access the Feedburner detailed statistics you can add this code to your feed file (i.e. rss.php or similar):
$feedburnerfeed="http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeed";
$ch = curl_init();
$useragent=$_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'];
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $useragent);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $feedburnerfeed);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
Thanks Leo Paiva for the .htaccess tip and Mark Wielgus for the PHP code.
Update: The two redirect methods work only for people copying your feed address directly into their readers. If they click on the link, they will get redirected to Feedburner and they will end up subscribing to that feed. The PHP code method so far is the only way to retain 100% control of your subscribers.
About Mark
Mark is an digital entrepreneur from New York City who recently acquired DBT. He started his ventures buying growing then selling several businesses and content blogs on Flippa. A perfect night for him constitutes pizza, wine, slow jazz and WordPress! He's an SEO expert and a growth strategist. When he's not working on his businesses he enjoys sharing his learned lessons with the DBT community.
@Sahil: Yes we all get your poin but its called as “Prevention is better than cure”. Feedburner is a service which is MAJORLY used by everyone. In Search engines we have options, there are many search engines not all will go down and they never wil.There is chance of getting hits again from search engines if they go down, people will stil use it and come back.
But if once reader gets a 404 for your feed rad its bad for your blog .Feedburner is kind of service
which we are depending on too much. They will also not go down chances are 1 out of 10. But you dont loose your readers when they go for temporory shutdown. Its always good to have a backup than having nothing at all….
Great! It’s look like a way to get traffic.
I am not getting this..
the post is based on “WHAT IF” one day feedburner goes down….
This “what if” can do whatever you want it to do.. what if one day google search goes down.. “Shouldn’t we make our own seperate search engine to save us from that day”
The biggest problem is that many readers also get the redirect. Then they end up with feedburner either way.
Hey Daniel,
Argh. Stupid ‘,’…
Rick, if you are picking this up – could I ask you a question:
@Egon : you have a point there, I think daniel is going to test this thing.I am waiting for his answer too
But what if the person just right-click, “copy link location” then adds to their RSS reader? That’s what I do, so wouldn’t that not be redirecting?
matwilko, as Engtech explained we are not talking about huge bandwidth here, RSS feeds are usually very light (they carry the text, not the format or design).
This is a great solution to a not-so great problem, but wouldn’t the second solution using curl use your servers bandwidth instead of Feedburners, which is usually the idea in the first place?
I have one problem with Feedburner. I administer a blog where we publish [different] content in six languages.
@brian: it should be something low like 500 bytes per request, so even a runaway feed reader can’t do damage.
How much additional bandwidth do you think this causes? (I’m assuming the redirect doesn’t cause much.) That was my main reason for using feedburner, I didn’t want to have to deal with constant downloads of a RSS feed by a runaway feed reader.
If somebody can program to check if burner service is alive or not and then redirect ..it will be cool. Because if its a redirect When service is down…people will landup on 404 page if we dont disable the plugin or change the htaccess file
Matt: I got the idea now. I was discussin g this with him lol…Thanks for the explanation
Ashish
Ah ok…lol got it..Agreed to your point
Daniel, But the source of feed which the subscribers have subscribed to is still feedburner. IF feedburner stops the source will not change…Its a redirect which means readers never got the feed from the blog but from feedburner….
Amanda, if you use your own feed and place the redirects I mentioned or the PHP code you will still get access to the Feedburner stats and the feed count.
Ashish, think about those 2 scenarios.
Daneil what difference does it make if i offer direct link or do a redirect ? They ultimately landup to feed which is burnt by feedburner…..
I like feedburner because of the count is has. is there a way to track for your own feed does anyone know *shakes you*
Cheers Daniel.
David, you are asking about how feedburner affects your site statistics like page views and visitors right?
Just curious… Would putting that “in-between” link take away from your stats as well? Meaning, if subscribers were visiting via Feedburner, do they show up in your statistics?
Matt, thanks. I had been thinking about this problem for some time already and remembered to fix it for good yesterday when you posted the comment.
Hey Daniel – nice quick response. And an excellent concise post.