This RSS Feed Is Moving

Tuesday, February 01, 2005

A little bit of housekeeping - my RSS feed is moving and I'd like to ask a few of you, dear readers, to update your blog readers accordingly. Some of you won't have to, read on to see which camp you're in.

The link in the "Subscribe" box in the sidebar and in the meta section of my blog pages point to this link at Feedburner as the preferred source for RSS updates of my content. It's been that way for quite a while. The problem is that some enterprising and overeager blog aggregators (like bloglines) dig up the actual feed itself in addition to that one and people have no way to know that it's not the preferred one anymore. This hasn't been too big of a problem until recently, as I've become more and more addicted to Feedburner's per-post stats on what people are reading and finding worthwhile, i.e. clickthrough-worthy.

To make it worth the few kilojoules of effort to make the switch, let me entice you. You'll get some extra features not in the regular 87 octane feed, things you may not have even known you were missing, such as:

  • Daily del.icio.us links - Feedburner takes all of the links that I found interesting and that I bookmarked with del.icio.us during the course of the day, batches them into one big list and makes a single post out of that. Think of it as a little daily newsletter about what my web surfing has turned up.
  • Flickr photos - anything that I post to my Flickr account automagically goes into my Feedburner feed too. You get to see through my eyes.
  • Optimized data format - you feel like switching newsreaders? Don't know if it supports Atom, RSS 2.0, 1.0, Bulgarian smoke signals? No problem, those geniuses at Feedburner detect what kind of feed you need and serve it up accordingly. No more format wars, at least not in my house.

I'll get a few perks too:

  • Decreased server load - the feed is cached and served up from Feedburner's servers, so I don't get a million hits a day from automated requests while people leave their blogreaders open. Not that there's anything wrong with that.
  • Increased reliability - every once in a blue moon, I'd say about once or twice a year, I find that my alabut.com server is down. I only put up with this madness because of the ridiculously low cost for a hosting plan with no bandwidth restrictions, a very rare bird. My site being down is scary enough as it is, but it'd ease the pain a little if I knew people could still get my info regardless and that the server issues were invisible to them.
  • Permanence - I'll never have to ask anyone to update their link to my feed ever again. No matter where on the server or even to another domain I move my actual feed to, the address for the Feedburner link will always remain the same.
  • Audience information - I get all kinds of traffic stats on the feeds, with the per-post info being especially useful. Now I can see how many people are out there, how many of them click through to the site itself, which posts get clicked on most, among other data, all of which hopefully leads to...
  • ...better content, making me a better and more relevant writer, since I'll be able to see what rings a bell or not. For example, this post about super useful things I've recently found has been my most popular so far and opened my eyes to the idea of doing more short posts like that, just big ol lists of useful links. Wait, del.icio.us already does that. But for different stuff. Well, you get the idea.

If my bloglines data is a rough indicator, I'd say about half of you get your feed straight from the tap, as it were, and the other half get it from the fancy newer bottled source. Hopefully I can get everyone switched over without anyone deciding it's not worth the effort :) and I can't guarantee that I won't move the actual non-Feedburner file to a less public location in the near future to hide it from bad robots, so you've been forewarned - please update your readers!

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