First, what is FeedBurner?  At it’s core, FeedBurner republishes blog feeds.  This alone isn’t all that exciting, however, the service provides so much more.

FeedBurner’s most attractive feature is it’s analytics.  The service keeps track of feed subscribers, applications used to access your feed, where your readers are located and a few other statistics. 

Not only does FeedBurner manage your analytics, it also helps build your user base by introducing easy ways for readers to subscribe to your feed (via RSS, HTML and/or email) and by submitting your posts to numerous search engines for easy indexing.  And, of course, there’s the attractive FeedBurner counter you see on everyone’s site these days.  I mean, who can resist clicking on that little baby?

FeedBurner presumably maintains your reader base as well.  This is done by ensuring your feed is compatible with all aggregators and by adding features to your post such as email options and links to social bookmarking services.  Additionally, FeedBurner lets you change your feed location.  If you happen to move your blog to another domain you are going to want to bring your readers with you, right?

Any of these features are good reason to sign up with the service, but why did I start using FeedBurner?  Mostly because everyone else is doing it.  That’s right.  I guess I submitted to the peer pressure. :)

If you are interested in setting up a FeedBurner account or if you want to know how to integrate FeedBurner into your site, keep reading.  I also go a little deeper into feature list mention above as well.

FeedBurner Account Setup

This part is easy and free. 

  1. Figure out your blog’s feed URL.  (I don’t know what it looks like for all blog types, but for WordPress it is similar to http://www.sitename.com/feed.)
  2. Visit FeedBurner and submit your feed URL.   
  3. Provide very little account information (blog name, user name, password, etc)
  4. Activate features.  I would suggest browsing through the options on the Optimize tab first.  I added some “FeedFlare” such as links on the footer of each post to comment counts, add to del.icio.us, add to digg and email.  I also modified my feed’s Title/Description.  Many of the “Optimize” features are free so go nuts.
  5. Head over the “Publicize” tab.  You will probably want to select all of the options under “PingShot.” This automatically notifies services like Technorati and Ping-o-matic when you publish a post.  If you would like to display the FeedBurner counter (chicklet) on your site, check out “FeedCount.” I would also recommend looking into ”Email Subscriptions” even though I haven’t activated this feature myself yet.  
  6. Wait about 24 hours and then have a look at the “Analyze” section.  Twenty four hours is the amount of time FeedBurner needs to start “building” your feed statistics.  If you need some instant gratification, “Live Hits” should be immediately available.
  7. Have a look at the premium service.  They aren’t expensive and they may be worth it to you.

Site Integration

How do you integrate a new FeedBurner feed into your blog?  After all, you may have millions of readers already tied to your current feed URL. 

If you are running WordPress, you are in luck. Check out the FeedBurner Plugin v2.1 from OrderedList.com.  The plugin detects all of the ways one might be accessing your WP feed.  For example, both http://www.johnnycoder.com/blog/feed/ and http://www.johnnycoder.com/blog/wp-rss2.php are valid feed URLs for this site.  After detection, the plugin will automatically start redirecting callers your new FeedBurner feed.  The redirection will allow you to track all subscriber - existing and new.  The plugin handles forwarding for your main post feed and optionally your main comments feed.  It is quick and easy to install and, to some extent, it will even walk you through the FeedBurner account setup. I was personally up and running in minutes and I understand the plugin works for both WP 1.5 and 2.0.

If you aren’t using WordPress and you can’t leverage this plugin, you’re going to have to find all instances of the RSS feed in your blog template and modify them to point to your new FeedBurner URL.  It should not be too hard, but it may be cumbersome.  You will also want to inform your readers of the feed URL change since they will have to resubscribe to your RSS.

Alternatively, if you have the means, write your own redirection routine at each entry point.  This way, you too, can automatically keep your current reader base.