Link To Your Site Then Redirect
I’m going to have to call out my good friend James Archer for inspiring this entry so hopefully he doesn’t mind me using him as an example. Recently I have decided I would give FeedBurner another shot. I used them when they first came out, but there were a lot of bugs and what not that made my feeds almost unreadable so I was curious to see if things had improved any. Unfortunately to use their service you must also use their feed url instead of your own.
Thank god for .htaccess.
With the way we experiment with services and technologies it can be a pain sometimes having to fix everything up whenever a slight change is made. Who knows if another feed service will pop up that blows FeedBurner out of the water? Will you stay with FeedBurner because all of your feed links point to it or will you go through the hassle of not only redirecting the original feed to the new feed service, but also adding another rule in your .htaccess that redirects the FeedBurner url to the new service? Mr. Archer has a link that points to the FeedBurner url and hopefully he never changes services in the future because he will have to add a rule in his .htaccess file. Imagine if he changed services 10 different times over the next couple of years. He might get stuck in an infinite redirect loop (maybe that would be cool though), but that might only happen if he continues to change the feed link on the site.
All is not lost for James though since he simply has to redirect his audience from the FeedBurner feed to the new one and can stick with that rule for the lifetime of his site. I like the idea that everyone points to this feed and are redirected to whatever service I choose to redirect them towards all through one rule in the .htaccess file. Try to keep all links on your site pointing to your site because you never know what the future holds.
Related reading:
Interesting. I’ve never thought of the repercussions of FeedBurner going down. It’d be one hell of a mess that’s for sure.
I shall be implementing the /feed/ idea on to my new site shortly, thanks!
By Chris Gwynne on May 20, 2006 12:10 pm
Hell, for some reason that scenario didn’t even cross my mind. What happens if FeedBurner does go down? You can add another redirect back to your feed I suppose, but wouldn’t it be 2 seconds easier to just remove the redirect line that you currently have?
In any case we have to be somewhat cautious when using third-parties to control any part of our site.
By Scrivs on May 20, 2006 1:22 pm
SImilarly I tried FeedBurner early on but it was never great at handling RSS 1.0 which I prefer so I gave up on it. Maybe time to revisit it and try again but for the scenario above and others, I was never comfortable managing part of my site through another party’s site.
By WD MIlner on May 20, 2006 2:54 pm
Okay, already, I’m on it! :-P
This was a reboot leftover. I had originally intended to build my own RSS landing page with functionality comparable to that of FeedBurner (subscription buttons, nice formatting, etc.), but haven’t had to chance to get around to it. You know, the usual story.
However, I don’t think it’s quite as simple as redirecting it using .htaccess. If you click on a link to /index.xml and am taken to the FeedBurner landing page, then it’s still that page with which you’ll subscribe. It’s viable, but really only if you put all the bloglines, etc., buttons on your own site, and don’t link directly to the feed. (Unless there’s something I’m missing, of course.)
You also potentially run into problems because with the plethora of non-standard feed readers out there. Not all of them understand how to handle something like a 301 redirect or a URL rewrite, so again, it’s not as simple as just moving people from one URL to another.
It looks like the most feasible solution might be to use their MyBrand service (not that I needed yet another monthly charge–thanks Web 2.0!). MyBrand runs Feedburner transparently through a subdomain, which might be the most solid and cross-compatible solution, even though it’s more of a hassle too.
If there’s something I’ve missed here, though, please do let me know. I’d love to find a stable way to use FeedBurner without breaking the experience for folks using oddball readers.
By James Archer on May 20, 2006 5:54 pm
1) In the first scenario there really isn’t that much you can do from preventing someone from clicking on the feed link, waiting for the feedburner page to come up and then cutting and pasting the url from the url bar into their feedreader.
This might go against how redirects really work, but whether you are non-standard or not, doesn’t the server push the redirects through and not the client trying to access the site?
Doesn’t all of your thoughts apply to you as well if you decide to jump to another service?
By Scrivs on May 20, 2006 6:11 pm
Actually, I believe (I could be wrong), that it’s the client that’s responsible for the actual redirect. Some haphazardly-assembled applications (*cough*Web 2.0*cough*) assume an ideal situation in which the HTTP request returns actual content, and they just choke when it returns a redirect message instead.
I totally agree with your point about switching services, FB going down, etc. I’m not defending the notion of using FB as our primary feed URL. I guess I’m just saying that it’s not as simple as just tossing a couple of lines in the .htaccess and calling it a day.
I’ll probably patch it up over the weekend, but to my mind the two viable options are A) quit FB and just use my own feed solution, or B) use (and pay for) their MyBrand service.
(By the way, it looks like your feed is borked. I just tried subscribing, but when I click on it I just get a FeedBurner page with the HTML contents of this site.)
By James Archer on May 20, 2006 6:21 pm
So basically you are saying that by just doing a simple redirect in .htaccess you are not guaranteeing that 100% of your audience will go to the new feed because of how some readers handle redirects? Assuming you are correct in how redirects work then I could see that happening.
Could you try my feed now and let me know if it works. Oh the irony of writing this entry and then borking my own feed. Smooth Scrivs, smooth.
By Scrivs on May 20, 2006 6:35 pm
Yep, looks like it’s working now…though the main link redirects me to FB, so you’re going to have some percentage of your audience subscribing directly to that feed address. (..and round and round we go!)
I’ll probably try out the MyBrand service and let you know how it goes. (Meanwhile, if anyone else has a brilliant solution that we missed, please do share.)
By James Archer on May 20, 2006 6:59 pm
I’m really glad that you wrote this today. I tried using FeedBurner a few months back because I wanted to track and display the number of people that were subscribing to my feed. In the end, I opted on not using them because NetNewsWire couldn’t find the FeedBurner feed properly…..and this was when i was testing the link myself, so I’m quite sure that other people had a hard time finding it during the short time that I used FB.
The .htaccess idea sounds great, but i it’s like James says, that some will find the WP feed and some will still go thru FB, then I’ll have to think of something else. Doesn’t Mint tracks a blogs feeds and it’s subscribers? I haven’t purchased it yet, so I’m not sure…
By viperteq on May 20, 2006 7:15 pm
James,
You need to alter your Feedburner settings so the Subscribe Now! links at your Feedburner page point to
http://www.fortymedia.com/index.xml. That way you’ll stop most people from subscribing to the Feedburner feed url.
BTW, you’ve been able to keep your original feed URL while using Feedburner since at least October 2004:
http://forums.feedburner.com/viewtopic.php?t=3
By Scott on May 20, 2006 10:02 pm
One another thing – there is a Wordpress plugin (by 9rules member Steve Smith) that can handle most of this for you:
http://orderedlist.com/articles/wordpress-feedburner-plugin/
You will still need to change your Feedburner Subscribe Now! settings to point to your canonical feed url yourself though. See the TechJapan feed page for an example of this:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/techjapan
By Scott on May 20, 2006 10:17 pm
Yes, Steve is a super genius and that’s the plugin I used for this site although the canonical feed didn’t workout so I simply went straight to the WP RSS feed.
By Scrivs on May 20, 2006 10:33 pm
Scott, where in the world is that FeedBurner setting? I’ve been looking all over and can’t find it? I’ve already got the site set up to do the redirection and stuff, but it’s that missing piece of changing the URL within FeedBurner that I can’t find.
By James Archer on May 20, 2006 10:58 pm
Nevermind, just found it! It’s located under Optimize > Browser Friendly > User your redirected feed… (a tiny link down at the bottom).
I think I should be squared away. What up now, Scrivs?
By James Archer on May 20, 2006 11:01 pm
You got me there James ;-)
By Scrivs on May 21, 2006 2:42 am
[...] If you missed it make sure to checkout yesterday’s discussion on redirects and third party services. [...]
By Benefits of Removing ‘www’ From Your URL » Wisdump on May 21, 2006 11:52 am
Thanks Scott for mentioning the Feedburner redirects and James for finding it–it is the most hidden option ever! I’ve been redirecting feeds from my domain for a while and this solution takes care of most of the problems.
By Dat Nguyen on May 21, 2006 4:57 pm
[...] Entrei em contato com os caras. Vamos ver quanto tempo demoram pra resolver o problema. Até hoje, tudo era lindo. Espero que essa feiura seja passageira. Mas, caso não seja, pelo menos o controle do meu feed está nas minhas mãos e eu faço com ele o que eu quiser. Lembre-se: não entregue o controle do seu feed para ninguém. Nenhum serviço de terceiros pode cuidar dele melhor que você. [...]
By Feedburner bagunçando caracteres especiais em UTF-8 | Bruno Torres ponto net on June 19, 2006 9:12 pm