Product Review: Use FeedBurner to supercharge your RSS feed
Tuesday, January 29th, 2008
Ahh, the good old saying, “If you can’t measure it, then you can’t manage it.” Google’s FeedBurner service helps solve this problem with your RSS feeds (What the hell is RSS?), and it adds some really cool features along with it.
How it works
When you sign up for FeedBurner, you give it your RSS feed’s address, and FeedBurner gives you a new feed address to replace it with. When people subscribe to your new FeedBurner address, the service starts tracking subscriptions. This process is called “burning your feed.” Don’t worry, nothing is set on fire. 
There are plugins for the different blog platforms that allow you to redirect your current subscribers to your new FeedBurner address so you can start tracking immediately.
Track your feed’s subscribers
A day after you’re set up, you can start reporting on how many people are subscribed to your feed. The first thing you see when you sign in is a report of the last 30 days of activity. This is nice because you can see if your actions (or inactions) are causing new people to subscribe, or, worse yet, causing people to unsubscribe.
You can click on each of the bars in the dashboard report to get a report on activities for that given day. Here’s an example for activity on my Web Developer Blog:
As you can see, I had 22 subscribers on January 28, and 1 person viewed my entry called Columbus Digital Adobe User Group.
FeedBurner does much more than reporting!
I’m not going to list every feature that FeedBurner offers, but here are some other cool things the service offers that I think are very valuable. Quite honestly, I haven’t explored the other features, so you may even find something cool that I’m unaware of.
Email subscriptions
Some people may prefer to sign up for an email digest of your posts and articles. FeedBurner manages all of this for you and gives you a snippet of code to post in your blog’s sidebar or on a separate “sign up” page that you can insert a link to. You can use FeedBurner to brand the emails with your logo and font colors. It also allows for you to choose a time of day to send out the daily digest. (Stay tuned for optimal times to send emails in a future Glass Case post.)
Great uptime and portability
With FeedBurner, your feed will always be up, even if your blog goes down. I trust Google’s ability to keep their services running, even over my own abilities.
Also, if your blog moves addresses one day, your feed won’t. You just point FeedBurner to the new feed address, and your subscribers will be none the wiser!
Automatic blog service pinging
FeedBurner can take care of “pinging” major blog communities every time it detects that you have a new article. This means that FeedBurner alerts popular blog communities like Technorati, My Yahoo, Bloglines, and Google Blog Search for you automagically. Automatic exposure for all of your entries!
Code stuff
FeedBurner is obsessed with RSS feeds, and you aren’t. Hell, I’m not even obsessed with RSS feed code either, and I’m a web geek! They can automatically make sure that your feed is displaying the correct code so that it works in most feed readers. It’s nice to have one less thing to worry about.
I’m a FeedBurner fanatic
Yes, I heart FeedBurner. I think I’m even going to send out for some of their swag so I can proudly post it on the cover of my laptop.
I hope you can find the same value in the service that I have. Let us know in the comments if you find any more hidden gems that I didn’t mention.
February 5th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
Chris:
I have a question about my e-mail subscription base in Feedburner for my blog. Some of those who signed up have not verified their subscription (so they appear with “Unverified” and an X beside their information. Do you know if they are still receiving my blog via e-mail or what I can do to get them to verify? We’re talking about people who signed up ages ago and probably no longer have the original email from Feedburner!
February 5th, 2008 at 8:09 pm
Sharon,
A test… You mentioned that you had signed your husband up for the Glass Case email subscription too. It appears that he never verified his subscription. Does he receive my posts in his email?
February 7th, 2008 at 8:05 pm
Good answer. He hasn’t verified and he’s not getting the emails. I guess I’ll delete the unverifieds.
Thanks!
August 4th, 2009 at 6:36 pm
my feedburner is sending emails 1 day after i post an article is this normal? if yes the system is not good cause if i write about fresh news when readers open the rss by email the news are late..
August 5th, 2009 at 3:54 pm
I suppose that is a major constraint in their Email Subscription service. They only send a digest of posts from the past 24 hours, once a day.
If you opt to use this, I recommend setting it to a time that you think people would pay attention to their email. For example, early morning would be bad because it would likely get filtered out with other marketing emails when a recipient first arrives at work.
Remember, real-time emails probably aren’t as convenient for people as you may think they are. It may get annoying for them after a while. And it’s almost guaranteed that people don’t love your posts as much as you do.
September 23rd, 2009 at 6:10 am
I have another question about the unverified mail addresses. I confirmed my mail address as I subscribed to my own blog. I even got the note “Email Subscription Confirmed! A message will be delivered to XXX@www.com if the publisher has produced new content on that day. No new content, no email for you.” on the confirmation homepage. Unfortunately, I’m still listed as unverified and don’t get any mails about new posts.
Other subscribers have the same problem. Can you help me? Thanks a lot!
Best regards
Monica
September 23rd, 2009 at 9:02 am
Monica,
You could try searching their Help Group or asking a question on there.
There is also some interesting info on this post: Problems with FeedBurner Email Delivery. (Look in the comments too).
November 25th, 2009 at 8:37 am
I’m not sure this is the right place but Im a newb trying to set up a feefburner feed for my wordpress blog. Im not getting the sign up page. Ive really searched. Seems like Google is leaning so much on the old dogs and so is everyone on the web. Do you have a link or something?
November 26th, 2009 at 12:33 am
As far as I know, you can register at feedburner.google.com.
November 26th, 2009 at 10:01 pm
Thanks Chris, but I had tried that and was told the RSS feed on that address was not valid. Im sure my feeds are @ http://www.lyvido.com/feed/ . If I type it on the browser I land on them. Is there anything I’m missing?
November 27th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Lyvido,
Try running this URL. Looks like you need to get rid of those JavaScript calls in your feed in order for FeedBurner to accept it.
http://validator.w3.org/feed/check.cgi?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.lyvido.com%2Ffeed%2F
November 29th, 2009 at 12:49 pm
Hi Chris,
Thanks for the link. Its +ve. I have a problem with the source due to JS (adsense codes). It says the feed is valid though but not very usable hence need to get rid of JS bit. “Houston, I have a problem!” How do I get rid of that. My brief research finds I can’t edit WP feeds code. Solution? Thanks
November 29th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
Hi Chris, Again, My feeds got burnt somehow (http://feeds.feedburner.com/lyvido). I tried afterwards. Q: When you “check” your feeds validity using the link you gave me, does it correct the problem? Yo’ve been very helpful thanks
November 30th, 2009 at 11:18 am
Validating your feed using the W3C Feed Validator does not alter your code in anyway. Not sure why it would have just started working if you didn’t change anything on your end. Maybe Google changed something on FeedBurner so that it would start working?
Oh well, let’s just be happy that it works now.
November 30th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Of course, that’s one of the more fascinating things about techknowlogy, just coined that. It’s so unpredictable.