Wordpress has the ability to generate great RSS feeds, and even to automatically generate enclosures for podcasting. But I still use, and love Feedburner for all my RSS feeds. Why? Let me tell you…
Feedburner is basically a service that takes an existing RSS feed and lets you do all kinds of things with it. A few of the major features are: Inserting ads into your RSS feed, Stats and making your feed iTunes compatible. Those reasons aren’t specifically why I have used it. There are a couple of other features that have saved my butt in the past.
1. Feed redirection. This isn’t even advertised as a feature, but it’s great. So here’s how I have my Podcast RSS feed set up: Wordpress RSS —> Feedburner —> iTunes. You may wonder, why stick Feedburner in the middle, when Wordpress can generate a feed that works just fine in iTunes? In the past I was using Libsyn’s feature where they generate RSS for you, so it was actually set up like this: Libsyn RSS —> Feedburner —> iTunes. But I wanted to use Podtrac for tracking downloads, and Libsyn doesn’t support that. They also don’t support feed redirection so I couldn’t redirect the feed to my wordpress feed. If I had it set up like this: Libsyn —> iTunes, I’d be out of luck, I would have had to submit a new podcast to iTunes and rebuild my subscriber list.
With feedburner, the solution was simple. Edit Feed details, and change the Original feed url from Libsyn (Libsyn —> Feedburner —> iTunes) to Wordpress (Wordpress —> Feedburner —> iTunes.
I also have the re-assurance that if I ever lose control of my web site (dispute with hosting provider, hacking etc) I can go into feedburner and just point the feed somewhere else.
2. Title/Description burner. I love this one. If you are using some service that creates an RSS feed but doesn’t give you much control (like I did with Utterli in episode 20), and you want to pass that feed into iTunes (Utterli —> Feedburner —> iTunes) often the title or description won’t be something you want. In episode 20, the title was “Utterli” instead of something like “dave’s podcast”. Title/Description burner simply overrides the title and description fields in the RSS feed before it is passed on. It’s just that easy.
The only major concern, and one that you should have when you’re relying so heavily on any service, is will it be there tomorrow? Especially in today’s economic climate it’s not a given that an internet company that was here yesterday will necessarily be here today or tomorrow. The nice thing about Feedburner is that Google owns them now. And let me tell you, google isn’t going away any time soon, so niether is feedburner.
Feedburner has tons of other great features too. When you go in to edit your feed, make sure to click on the Optimize tab, and check out all the cool options.
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