The main concern with using a service like Feedburner is the control over feeds. If Feedburner is allowed to republish a feed and then after some time they go out of business, what happens then? Many people who used that feed would be left with a dead feed. For the feed owner that would mean loss of audience, which could also mean loss of revenue.

One solution around this is redirection. Essentially, the feed owner would advertise their non-Feedburner feed. However, this feed would be redirected to the Feedburner feed. The goal is to maintain the use of the original feed, but gaining the stats that Feedburner supplies.

For WordPress users, redirection has several complications. First, if WordPress is not using .htaccess to create permalinks, then redirection will not work. WordPress needs to be using the .htaccess file in order for redirection to work. For example, if the chosen method of doing permalinks is to include “index.php” within the URL of the permalink, then WordPress totally ignores anything within the .htaccess file (or at least seems to).

There are complications as well if using the .htaccess file for permalinks. Redirection can be accomplish via a WordPress plugin or by maually manipulating the .htaccess file.

The plugin is pretty handy. However, the main problem I have with it is that it can create a very large set of rewrite rules within your .htaccess file. This is especially true if you use the Page options within WordPress. The more Pages you have, the more rules the plugin writes, the larger the .htaccess file gets, the harder the .htaccess is to maintain, and the higher the possibility something will go accidentily awry. I am not a .htaccess expert. One needs to be well versed in regular expressions and I would rather poke my eye out with a fork then learn the ins and outs of Regex. Especially for the beginner, the simpler the .htaccess file, the better. If the .htaccess gets trashed, and the site is completely down, how is the beginner going to get it back up? Not without a lot of frustration. I know that WordPress now writes the .htaccess file automatically and that makes it easier to use. It still make me nervous though.

I have read several posts by users that have manually written rewrite rules to their .htaccess that redirects their feed. I have noticed two problems with this. Sometimes it does not work: I access their feed and I do not get redirected to the Feedburner feed. Second, WordPress (if WordPress is accessing the .htaccess file) will often rewrite their manual instructions (which is most likely the cause of #1).

What approach should the beginner take to Feedburner? Wait. There are a million things more important to work on then worry about Feed stats. As much as I think that the services Feedburner offers are cool, I think it is prudent for the beginner to wait. Wait for what? Wait until someone develops a utility that can be installed on your own server (much like CARP is for RSS aggregation) that can track feed statistics.

Surely someone out there is working on this. I would think some of the web stat companies like StatCounter or Opentracker would be working on this, as well as members of the open source community. For WordPress users, wouldn’t it be cool if this was built into WordPress or a stats plugin developed?

Something to think about.

05.23.2005 @ 9:09 AM — Filed under:

• RSS Solutions
• WordPress Help

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