Using Feedburner to add statistics to your RSS feed
Out of many of the free RSS and blogging services that I
have tried one of the most useful has been Feedburner.
Feedburner allows you to publish your RSS feed and provides
circulation statistics about your RSS feed. It also allows you
to make your feed more friendly by using Feedburners Smartfeed
system and can also make your feed browser friendly.
The most useful service provided by Feedburner are it's
circulation statistics. These statistics are not only useful for
yourself to see how popular your feed is but also to provide
circulation statistics to potential advertisers. Feedburner can
tell you which RSS readers are being used to read your feed, how
many readers you have and which posts readers are clicking
through back to your website.
Feedburners Smartfeed system can supply the most valid feed by
detecting which RSS reader the user is using. This irons out any
potential compatibility problems there may be between your feed
and the readers feed reading software. If your visitor click on
your RSS feed subscription link Feedburner will provide your
visitor with a web friendly version of the feed rather than an
unformatted XML file. This is great for educating the reader
about RSS feeds.
To use Feedburners services first you need to go to Feedburner and
enter your feed link. Your feed link is the address you give
your readers to add your feed to their feed readers. Take a look
at my RSS sign up page at Newsniche to get a
better idea of how this works.
Once you have your feed address enter it into text box on the
Feedburner page. Clicking on ok will bring up a page with all of
the options for your feed, you will need to decide for yourself
which services you need. At the bottom of the page will be your
new feed address which you will now offer to your readers
instead of your original feed address. Follow the rest of the
instructions to complete the process and then you will have an
improved feed with statistics.
There is one final point before we finish and it is something
optional you may wish to choose. You may wish to keep your
existing feed address if you have existing subscribers and to
future proof your feed. To do this you will need to use an HTTP
redirect in your htaccess file. If this means nothing to you I
would suggest further research before doing this.
You will need to add a new line to your htaccess file.
redirect temp /rssfeed.xml
http://feeds.feedburner.com/feedburnerFeed
You will need to change /rssfeed.xml to the name of your current
feed and the Feedburner path to the new feed address you will be
given by Feedburner. You will need to point Feedburner to a copy
of your feed that only Feedburner will see. You will then offer
the /rssfeed.xml feed address you created in your htaccess file
to you visitors to subscribe to your feed.
This is how it should work. Feedburner will periodically check
your address you gave to Feedburner for new posts. Your visitors
will subscribe using the address you used in your htaccess file
and get redirected to the feed that Feedburner has created for
you. This will mean that in the future if you wish to stop using
the Feedburner service all you need to do is remove the line
from your htaccess file and your readers will not notice any
difference.