Solo Technology

FeedBurner is a neat service that I suspect most bloggers have at least heard of, if not used. I know I’ve mentioned it in passing quite a few times in the last year, but it has been pointed out that I’ve never really said what it is.

In a nutshell: They’ll take your RSS Feed and serve it out to those who want it (with reporting!) and optionally add other bells and whistles to it to hopefully attract more readers.

The reporting part is awesome as figuring out readership with apache logs is damned near impossible. The other features are just icing on the cake. Oh, and the free version of this is all very capable.

It also seems like a nice (or cheap) way to minimize some server load and traffic from my el-cheapo budget plan. Back when I was self-hosted from home that was a key factor in using this service.
Have a WordPress blog? There are two plugins that make switching to FeedBurner very simple. And unlike previous versions, no .htaccess hacking or hidden feed redirections are necessary.

• FeedBurner Plugin by Ordered List — Version 2.2 as of this writing and is the one I’ve had the most success with. Perhaps because it is the one I found first.
• FeedBurner Plugin by flagrantdisregard - Version 1.2 as of this writing. I don’t have as much experience with this one. It seems to have a couple more options than the ordered list one but they weren’t options I really needed (but I’d wagers other do!)

Once you have a feed “burned” there, check out all the goodies for optimizing and publicizing. For instance, one of my current favorites is the publicize option called “Buzz Boost”.

BuzzBoost republishes your burned feed’s content as go-anywhere HTML. Want to promote your blog on another site you manage? BuzzBoost gives you a snippet of JavaScript you can paste into your page templates.

This is a very easy way to integrate blog content with more a static web site. Want to promote your blog(s) on some of your other web pages? This will work great, even on regular ol’ HTML pages. No server-side processing (or programming) necessary. You can see this in action on my Solo Technology Home and About pages (left column). There’s quite a bit of flexibility too as you can see in the screen shot. Making the feed blend in with your site is pretty straightforward with a bit of CSS styling.

There are quite a few other features to check out — and almost all of them are well worth your time.

4 Responses to “Fun With FeedBurner”

1. Rich G. on December 13th, 2006 2:25 pm
   

   I like feedburner stats as much as I like the google analytics stats. I find they don’t agree, how could they, feed vs. visitors, but it’s a nice complementary set of stats.

2. Rich G. on December 13th, 2006 3:18 pm
   

   other than feedburner and google analytics and mybloglog what other stats do you have?
   Which do you find most useful?

3. Chris on December 13th, 2006 3:46 pm
   

   Until recently I was also using Performancing.com’s metrics stuff. Loved it and probably the best as far as “at a glance” monitoring. But alas, they’re dumping it soon.

   I like Google’s Analytics as far as the level of detail, but there’s 80% of it that I’ll never inspect. And man, I wish their referrer report was more than just domain! If someone is referred to me I’d sure like to see the full referrer url.

   Feedburner rocks for keeping an eye on the feed traffic.

   I’m still getting used to what mybloglog can offer.

4. Rich G. on December 13th, 2006 9:38 pm
   

   Agreed on the detail of the referrer information from analytics… not enough.

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