A Hosted FeedBurner Alternative
In today’s ScrivsTyme my entry on TechCrunch and Basecamp were discussed a bit and the question arose of why we haven’t seen any FeedBurner alternatives yet. Let’s face it, some of us feel more secure about our data when we get to host it so why isn’t there a hosted FeedBurner alternative? I believe Mint has a plugin that track RSS readers, but no matter what I do Mint kills my database.
So is anyone aware of a FeedBurner alternative that accurately tracks your RSS stats? If there isn’t one why do you think no one has taken the plunge to create one yet? With today’s technology you would think something could be whipped up fairly quickly, at least on the backend, but maybe its just not a viable thing to do programatically for some reason.
If you know something please help me out.
Related reading:
Well, not exactly on topic, but there are two reasons why i use feedburner and I wouldn’t use a hosted service:
1. i started my blog at blogger. But immediately created my feedburner feed. When I moved the site to its own domain, transition was completely transparent to all my readers, they didn’t even noticed (except when I announced it).
2. Being on a shared hosting account, bandwith is something I worry about, and with 2000 readers (which isn’t a lot for the 9rules fellows i guess), I think I’d be using too many resources on the feed. With feedburner, it just gets the feed from my site once, and then everyone else calls feedburner, so my site is left alone, saving bandwith.
One thing i do hate though, is the lost of control for banning people :) Some guys just used my feed and copy it to their own wordpress forum (not the feed, but they copy it as posts in their wordpress blog). I guess they use some kind of plugin for wordpress. So, if I had my feed hosted at my site, I’d just blocked any request by certain domains. However, as it is in feedburner, i just have to live with that.
By az on July 11, 2006 5:16 pm
W3counter.com is cool, but I think it gets all of its feed data from Feedburner.
Off topic, (or maybe just expanded a little) what I’d really like to see is an alternative to Alexa. Publicly available stats like what one would pay Media Metrix or Nielsen to get.
Not just blog stats, but the whole traffic hoo-ha.
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[...and come on, it hasn't been 2.5 years of solid arguing -- there's been some good times mixed in there as well.]
By Mark on July 11, 2006 5:23 pm
[...] Scrivs [...]
By usmediaweb» The CC Anthology » A Hosted FeedBurner Alternative on July 11, 2006 5:48 pm
I thought there were some FeeBurner alternatives… from blatant ripoffs to some with useful features… it surprises me that you dunno any of them
By Julian on July 11, 2006 5:50 pm
Having just looked around there really isn’t much in the way of feedburner alternatives. Which in a way isn’t surprising as if you want something that does what feedburner does you use feedburner.
However, I am sure it wouldn’t be hard to knock something up with similar functionality. I might put something together and see how well it works. It would fit quite nicely with my free mint alternative I have made (currently unreleased). Good luck on the hunt Scrivs.
By Eddie Sowden on July 11, 2006 8:57 pm
If Mint is a problem, you might try SlimStat. It is a free packages that offers much the same features as Mint.
Alexa is a bit problematic to my thinking considering their stats and rankings are primarily geared to data collected by the Alexa toolbar and as such only those who actually use it provide the core of Alexa’s data. I’d bet that’s a small sample. Now if you could combine that with data from Google’s toolbar . . .
By WD Milner on July 11, 2006 9:37 pm
Scrivs at it again!
Funny you mention this…something I have been thinking about for awhile as well. I too am surprised that no one has taken the plunge, I’d say it’s a matter of time, but thats too obvious at this point :-)
By Aneil Weber on July 12, 2006 4:14 am
I wasn’t interested in using FeedBurner to avoid lock-in so I created my own script to analyse the access.log of Apache and generate some information.
It’s rather primitive for now but it does fulfill my needs and it’s also released as Free-Software. You can find it at http://baruch.ev-en.org/proj/feedstater/
By Baruch on July 13, 2006 6:55 am
Baruch: what lock-in?
Have you read their take on it?
It’s very easy to change services, if you want to.
By Konstantinos Christidis on July 18, 2006 8:12 am
For my two podcasts:
http://lawithkids.com
and
http://childrensbookradio.com
I use Webpasties. Much simpler to use the feedburner.
By Jody on December 28, 2006 12:25 am
[...] My main reason would be that I’m not comfortable with giving up the control and hosting of one of the most crucial parts of my blog, the RSS feed, into the hands of an external service. Not when I can be self sufficient in this. And I’m not the only one who shares that view. More recently, rumours were circulating about the possibility of Google aquiring Feedburner. While this was just more tech news to some, the prospect excited some people due to the possibilities of Adsense being integrated into feeds. As always it also filled others with dread about the growing Google monopoly over online services. I guess if you are one of those people, that would be another reason to find alternatives to the Feedburner service, because yesterday the rumour was confirmed. Google has indeed acquired Feedburner for an undisclosed amount, and now everyone is talking about it. For me, however, the main impetus is that it’s a challenge, and I love trying to solve these little technical conundrums. [...]
By How to assemble a Feedburner alternative using Wordpress plugins | SamirBharadwaj.com on June 2, 2007 8:30 pm
[...] of an external service. Not when I can be self sufficient in this. And I’m not the only one who shares that view. More recently, rumours were circulating about the possibility of Google aquiring Feedburner. While [...]
By How to assemble a Feedburner alternative using Wordpress plugins by Samir | Digital Storme | Life On The Web on July 13, 2007 9:40 pm
I’ve been using Feedity – http://feedity.com for creating custom RSS feeds from various webpages (including my blogspot blog). They have basic feed stats as well.
By neena on January 11, 2009 9:00 am
It’s now 3 years later and still no good alternative…
But Google is messing up Feedburner by just focusing on the Adsense possibilities… while I for one don’t want to spam my subscribers with ads in their feeds.
By Bas - Serial Expat on January 22, 2009 4:52 am
FeedBlitz has lauched an RSS service to compete with FeedBurner: http://feedblitz.blogspot.com/2009/03/feedburner-alternative-blitz-your-rss.html
Features RSS serving, metrics, RSS to mail / Twitter / IM, branding, mobile and browser friendly versions, social media flares and splices, tag filtering and more.
Thanks,
Phil Hollows
Founder
FeedBlitz
http://www.feedblitz.com
By Phil Hollows on March 28, 2009 10:30 am