Feedburner.

A few weeks ago I signed up with FeedBurner, and I’m continually impressed with their free offerings to the average blogger. The whole RSS feed thing seems simple on the surface but it can be dicey. Text and links is one thing, but what if your feed contains images and sound files? Plus, the importance of a blog’s RSS feed shouldn’t be underestimated. Sites like Technorati search your feed for new posts. Many users prefer to read blogs RSS feed readers (don’t worry, they’ll visit your site if a headline interests them). Anyhow, FeedBurner makes all this technical mumbo-jumbo work, without much effort on my part, so I can just concentrate on writing.

To sign up, just go to FeedBurner and submit your blog. Your new, “FeedBurnt” feed appears at a FeedBurner URL. FeedBurner provides many options, such as little tags at the bottom of each post displaying the number of comments or diggs, information on visitors, and troubleshooting. They can also serve up email subscriptions for your readers. It’s rather neat - daily, an HTML version of the new posts from the day before is sent out to subscribers.

After signing up, another step to take is updating the primary feeds at your blog to point to the FeedBurner one. This involves changing some link tags in your header.php file. The URLs specific to feeds should all point to the FeedBurner URL.

Feedburner also offers up interesting statistics on the number of subscribers and how they’re receiving their feeds, as in through RSS readers or browser bookmarks. You can display your subscriber number on your blog by adding a little code snippet to your sidebar. Clicking on the widget brings up the FeedBurner feed.

Another service that’s kind of handy is a little HTML chicklet that displays the most recent posts from your blog. It’s intended for use on other sites to advertise your blog. It can even be used as an email signature.

The Feedburner site is clean and intuitive. It reminds me of flickr in its visual polish and easy to read nature. I had no issues figuring out how to active different options and access feed-related information. My only minor complaint is their somewhat joking tone (”Trick Out Your Feed”) can be distracting at times.

In conclusion, the best part of Feedburner is that it takes work out of my hands. I don’t need to obsess over the details of my RSS feed to get it to work. Before, I had a worry that some wandering web denizen might look at the RSS feed spat out by WordPress and think it looked like mud. With that worry more or less eliminated, I can just get back to writing and brainstorming new ideas.

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