Do you worry about the danger of giving a 3rd party service control over the most important part of your blogging business – your subscribers?
- Redirect Plugins – Such as the Feedburner Redirect Plugin from Ordered List
- Feedburner MyBrand – This is a “pro” feature of Feedburner, and allows you to have Feedburner feeds on a subdomain, such as feeds.yourdomain.com
– this isn’t a perfect solution because the autodiscovery seems to always resolve before the feed is actually added, which results in a proportion of your sunscribers still subscribed to the Feedburner URL
– this is also not perfect, because that is a subdomain – I haven’t seen a site do anything to create an additional redirect to the subdomain to truly keep it on the same domain, but I am sure something should be possible – it also isn’t free – great for profitable blogs, not so great for lots of niche sites
Now there is an alternative, and it is pretty damn smart…
Feedburner Feeds Stats Hack
Mark has come up with an ingenious little hack to use Feedburner stats on his own feeds with a small patch to one of the WordPress core files.
I haven’t personally tested it yet, but I think Mark shows sufficient proof that it does work.
I am not sure how this works with click tracking, feed flares etc, or the best way to use this for email subscriptions. Also the feedburner feed is still there, and that is desirable for anyone migrating from one method to another. On a fresh site maybe you could make the Feedburner feed private so that you are the only one that accesses it.
You would also have to make sure that Feedburner is fetching a feed that is different to the one that is provided to your subscribers, otherwise you end up with a closed loop.
One major benefit of using Feedburner is that their uptime is very impressive, and they are using their bandwidth to serve your RSS. For many publishers that is quite a significant bandwidth saving.
Hopefully Mark will turn this into a plugin to make it easier to use, especially with the more frequent updates to WordPress these days.
*Originally published at AndyBeard.eu
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