FeedBurner Sign-up experiences
I decided to sign up for FeedBurner. It couldn’t have been much easier. Here’s what happened:
- I went to the Feedburner site – it already had me signed in to my Google Account
- I entered the Feed URL of my RSS feed
- I pressed next a couple of times
Simple, eh?
My new feed is up and running! If you’re interested, please subscribe.
Within the FeedBurner console, there’s a few tabs which allow me to see how many subscribers I have, etc. It’s neat. Even the copy they have to show the stats are being gathered is smooth:
The hard part was actually trying to redirect my WordPress feed URL to the new FeedBurner URL. There was no simple way to do it, at least that I could find up front. The FeedBurner Help sent me through all sorts of different things, before I could find what I was looking for. Even a Google Search wasn’t helpful.
The FeedBurner Help provided a hint to redirect any URL ending with .xml, but as I use the custom Permalink URLs, that won’t work. No luck there.
After some further digging, I discovered the FeedSmith plugin which does what I want it to do: redirect all of my existing feeds to FeedBurner. Perfect. I uploaded that plugin, activated it, and then typed in my new Feed URL. It’s all done.
What I want to know is why this FeedSmith plugin isn’t on the WordPress Plugins Directory? Would it have something to do with Google taking over the plugin’s development, and the fact that they own Blogger?