Comments on: Why Do We Use FeedBurner and What Alternatives Are Available for Feed Management?

By: gaith

gaith — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 14:03:14 +0000

there is feedoor http://feedoor.com it has more options than feedburner, merging feeds filtering etc. but no ads served yet.

By: Richard_Byrne

Richard_Byrne — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I too am wondering about other options for feed management. I don’t put ads in my feed nor do I really try to monetize my blog because the reason I write it is primarily as a service for public educators and to build reputation for consulting work. That said, when FB fails I feel like I’m losing contact with my subscribers who are crucial to building a good brand.

By: epc

epc — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Random things:
• one of the big benefits to me, small-time, 100 subscribers max blogger has been that my bandwidth usage dropped to near zero. Pre-feedburner I had maybe 50-75 services sucking down my feed repeatedly during the day, the whole feed and not just checking to see if there were any changes. I went from about 1Gb/day to 1Gb/month on my bandwidth usage by switching to FB.
• Stop, do-not-pass-go, log into feedburner now and turn on the “my brand” service. This was a premium service until Google bought FB and made it free to everyone. This allows you to set up feeds.centernetworks.com as an alias (properly: a CNAME) to the feedburner service. FB still serves the feed, but now you control the URL. If you decide to switch, you change where the CNAME points to (I didn’t switch to FB until this service was available for just this reason: I wanted to be able to redirect the feed).
• If you do decide to switch the feed, say tomorrow, don’t kill the feedburner feed. Publish two feeds, the existing FB feed source and whatever your new feed is. Modify the FB feed to include a blurb in each post indicating that the preferred feed is now . Run in parallel like this for awhile, even months.
• there appear to be two CN feeds: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Centernetworks and http://feeds.feedburner.com/Centernetworks- (which is linked in your page templates). The former feed returns immediately, but the latter (with the hyphen tagged at the end) requires a redirect and returns a subtly different feed. (Subtly as in: there’s minor XML differences but the content appears to be identical). Which feed is supposed to be the primary feed?
• I haven’t seen much value in the feedflare, and the options haven’t been updated in years
• It’s been my experience that feed tools are incredibly stupid, some follow redirects permanently, others don’t. I have feed URLs which I published in 2001, deleted in 2003, which tools which weren’t even AVAILABLE in 2003 continue to request even after receiving 404 or 410 error messages back.

I highly recommend switching to the MyBRand service immediately, regardless of what you decide to do with FB (one option: ditch FB, and alias the feeds.centernetworks.com URL to a PantherExpress sort of end point so that your site is not getting the full brunt of the various feed slurping tools).

WEBFD: My spouse is a $GOOGler.

By: centernetworks

centernetworks — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Wow – what a comment! I actually tried the mybrand 2x so far and both times was never able to completely get it to work – but you are right – i will try it again this weekend.

feedflare = yep hasn’t been updated in years

two cn feeds = i setup the one with the – first – can’t remember why – i think I screwed up to be honest – then they setup the one without the – which redirects to the one with the -

the whole fb interface needs a rework – get rid of the old crap, etc.

By: Phil Glockner

Phil Glockner — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

I’m sort of glad that my subscriber base isn’t that big and I haven’t had many logistical problems yet. But I do wonder why there hasn’t been a decent alternative feed distribution service that is commonly known.

Well, I guess there is FeedBlitz (http://www.feedblitz.com/) but it looks like they haven’t touched their service for longer than FeedBurner has FeedFlare.

By: Bill Flitter

Bill Flitter — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Allen, thanks for the mention and kind words. Regarding the updating of the feeds, we have several solutions to make feeds update in near real-time including a ping API and self-service option where you can log into your account at anytime and update your feed.

Bill Flitter
Founder, Pheedo

By: Dario Salvelli

Dario Salvelli — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Hy CN, there aren’t alternatives to Feedburner. Pheed is a good service for advertising. Yesterday i write a similar post: http://www.dariosalvelli.com/2009/01/best-alternatives-to-feedburner-le-alternative-a-feedburner-per-gestire-i-feed-rss

By: Phil Hollows

Phil Hollows — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

@Phil Glocker – our focus at FeedBlitz has been on building the industry’s leading RSS to email service – there are new features and enhancements released constantly, such as our new content abridging upgrade that keeps HTML such as links, images and other layout tags before the cut. We’ve offered an RSS version of newsletters primarily for publishers who don’t have an RSS feed but want one.

FeedBurner’s decline has not escaped our attention, though.

Stay tuned.

By: Carlos Guevara

Carlos Guevara — Wed, 30 Nov -0001 00:00:00 +0000

Recently feedburner makes headache to me some day the subscribers go to 500
The next day 50 this sense they moved to Google