Feedburner Review
Feedburner republishes enhanced RSS feeds. (What is a feed? Read here.)
Why Republish?
Simply to take advantage of the services Feedburner provides. Read more below.
What happens to the original feed?
The original feed remains intact. For example, the feed for this site is http://www.recommendedwebtools.com/index.php/feed. It is the main feed created by the blog. It is intact and operational. However, I tell people to subscribe to the Feedburner version of my feed:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/RecommendedWebTools. This link is used under my Syndication links and it is the feed I have submitted to various blog directories and such. Essentially, the original feed “feeds” the new Feedburner feed.
Why an enhanced feed?
Again, to take advantage of the services described below.
Registering a feed with Feedburner allows a user to take advantage of the following services:
1) gives your feed an easy name
Now this isnt a big deal in some cases. The name of the feed for this site is fairly easy as it originally stood. However, for some, Feedburner could substantially clean up the name.
2) Feed Statistics
How many people are subscribing to your feed?
What News aggregators are people using to read your feed?
What articles/posts are people clicking on in your feed?
All these question are answered with Feedburner’s Standard Stats package. The Standard package comes free with registration.
Keep in mind, that it has to be the Feedburner version of the feed that users subscribe too. IF users subscribe to the original feed, then Feedbruner cannot collect statistics.
3) Feed Format Compatibility
Using Smart Feed, Feedburner automatically makes the feed compatible with a given aggregator. Smart Feed automatically displays the feed in any one of the standard RSS and ATOM formats. Users will never have a problem reading your feed again.
4) Browser Friendly Feed
Opening the original RWT feed in a web browser results in an ugly looking XML document. Not difficult to read, but definitely not pretty. The Feedburner version of the feed is formatted to be easily read and it looks “pretty.” The feed can be customized to have a certain look and feel if viewed via a browser.
5) Bandwidth Absorption
Everytime a subscriber to a feed accesses that feed, bandwidth is used. By using Feedburner, webmasters can channel that bandwidth usage off onto the Feedburner servers. It is debatable how much bandwidth is used for feeds, for small sites it is probably negligible. Larger sites might be able to benefit.
6) Various Feed Publicity Tools
Use a Feed Counter to display how many people subscribe.
The Headline Animator can be used in a side bar, front page, email signature, etc to advertise the feed. (They could make this of even greater benefit if clicking on a specific headline brought the user directly to that post instead to just the main page of the blog).
Instead of using the standard orange XML gif file to list a feed, Feedburner offers a variety of other images.
7) Link Splicer
Splice favorite links directly into a feed. Feedburner can take links saved in Delicious, Furl or Bloglines and add them directly into the feed.
Photo Splicer
Like link splicer, but uses images saved on Flickr.
9) Smart Cast
Podcast enables a feed.
10) Creative Commons
Include a Creative Commons notice along with a feed.
11) Feed Image Burner
Places an image in your feed to make it stand out from other feeds. This feature is used when the feed is within a list of other feeds.
12) Amazon ID Burner
Refer to books on Amazon within posts? Amazon ID burner auto-inserts an Amazon Associates ID into a link to books on Amazon.
13) Summary Burner
Creates a summary paragraph for posts within a feed. Use this feature to entice readers to visit the website to finish reading the articles.
14) Convert Feed
Like Smart Feed, but soley converts a feed into one another kind of feed type (ie, RSS 1.0 to RSS 2.0).
15) Password Protection
Add password protection to a feed. Valuable if a feed needs to be availabe only to members or subscribers of a web site.
Take a serious look at all the features they have to offer. This has quickly become one of my favorite RSS services sites.
UPDATE: Read Part 2 of this review.
