{Image from Where’s My Glow}
Update: Thanks to Liz for providing her link (you can click through from the comments) which clarifies some issues with the API. So based on that the plugin won’t work. Which gives you three options.
1) Stay with Feedburner, but you’ll need to update all of your feeds to the feedburner address because the plugin won’t work. Should you ever want to move or migrate your feed you will need to ask the vast majority of your subscribers to re-subscribe to either your domain feed or your new feed, wherever that may be. Your stats will still update as per usual with Feedburner.
2) Update your feed links to your domain feed. Chances are some people have already signed up to subscribe this way and you have some people on your domain feed and some on your feedburner feed. You will not have access to stats. That way anyone new who signs up will be on your domain feed and if you ever wanted to move or migrate your feed you will not need to ask those people to re-subscribe.
3) There are paid options, like Feedblitz. They have a redirect plugin that works. You direct all your links to your domain feed. Your stats update. And if you ever wanted to move or migrate your feed you will not need to ask people to resubscribe because they are signed up through your domain feed, not the Feedblitz feed.
Personally, I’d much rather have an option where if I wanted to move my feed I could do that without needing to ask people to resubscribe.
There has been a whole lot of talk about feedburner lately. It’s not really clear what is happening, which makes a whole lot of people very nervous. Apparently the feedburner API is being deprecated as of the 20th October. This might mean nothing. It might mean the service will cease to operate. It might mean the service will still provide feeds but not report stats. It might mean that they are simply re-branding the service in some way. It’s extremely difficult to get any definitive information. And it’s a free service. A really cool, useful free service. But a free service that has no obligation to anyone. Which makes people very nervous. Especially when all of a sudden everyone’s feeds drop to zero. But this looks like an issue they are investigating so it looks unrelated!
But before you worry about feedburner, you need to worry about your feed.
A feed is the lifeblood of a blog. Most feeds are more popular than the actual site. Usually people will subscribe to your feed either by email or by RSS. Email subscribers are easy to migrate because they aren’t annonymous. But there is no way of tracking RSS subscribers so they are a whole lot harder to migrate. And regardless of what service you use to deliver your feed, you want to hold on to those subscribers.
Most people who use feedburner use a plugin to redirect their site feed from www.mysite.com.au/feed (or similar) to a feedburner address. And then the sidebar links to subscribe via rss or email will link directly to feedburner. This allows feedburner to pretty up the feed, ad some sharing options and provide you with stats. But do you really want your precious subscribers being owned by a third party?
So what’s the solution?
The solution is actually really simple. You keep the plugin to deliver your feed. But change your links advertising your feed to your domain feed. It will still be redirected and delivered by feedburner (or whatever third party service you use) but should you ever want to move or migrate or the feedburner service closed down you still have all of your RSS subscribers because they are connected to your domain feed and not your feedburner delivery address.
