Feedburner is your Friend
Let me preface this by saying I love Feedburner.
Since 2003, I’ve been publishing a ton of RSS feeds at the college where I work. Since 2005, I believe, I’ve been using Feedburner to help distrubute my RSS feeds. Here’s why.
First, Feedburner takes the load off you. If your feeds get popular at all, you’ll notice how often clients will poll your feed for updates. I was seeing clients updating every two minutes! By off-loading that to Feedburner, I don’t have to worry about the bandwidth. Here’s a quick graph showing the growth of just our news and events feed:
Second, the email subscription feature has been a huge hit on my campus. We’re offering it now for many feeds including our campus news and events, athletics, and many more. I could write a whole post about just their email delivery service (and someday will), but I’m using it with the college as well as another site I run and it’s drop-dead simple. Users opt-in, you style the email, add your logo and decide when the email will be delivered each day. Feedburner manages unsubscribes, which is very convenient, and will show you a list of your subscribers, including data on if they haven’t verified or their address is bad. You can see an example of an email subscription box here.
Third, Feedburner will ping a ton of web services for you to let them know you’ve updated your website. I think that’s awfully nice of them, and saves you the hassle of trying to manage that in your CMS or blogging software.
Fourth, stats. Feedburner has always been able to track how many are subscribed to your feed, and what they click on, but with their acquisition by Google, many of the for-pay services have been opened up, including more serious stats and tracking. That’s good data for us web devs to have and examine.
Fifth, Feedburner makes re-purposing your content very easy. They will make widgets for inclusion in your email, your blog, your MySpace, wherever you want to put it. One of my favorite uses is the graphical option. Here are two examples of this.
First, we have a web-based Rideboard here on campus. It’s cool enough for an entire post, but for now we’ll stick to the Feedburner part of it. We offer, of course, RSS feeds for each city so you can subscribe and get a feed of rides going to and from Cleveland, for example. We wanted to publicize this in a weekly email we send to students detailing upcoming weekend events on campus. I couldn’t import the RSS feed directly into the email or write some PHP to query the MySQL database, so I turned to Feedburner. I sent it a custom feed I created and had it create an animated GIF with my RSS feed headlines. You can use FB’s default styles, or you can upload and use your own graphic. Here’s the one I made:
What’s great about this is I don’t have to update this every time a new ride is posted, and there’s no action required by me when the email goes out. I also don’t have to worry about having stale content in that feed when the email goes out, because each time the image is called by an email client, they’ll see the most up-to-date rides available in there. Here’s an ErieBlogs.com Job Board example:
Finally, Feedburner makes it easy to splice together info from other sites, such as your social bookmarks and your Flickr photos into your feed. This is nice if you want to throw in the occasional campus shot into your feed.
I’m a fan of outsourcing web tasks to make life easier, and Feedburner is a great one-stop-shop for all your RSS needs. There’s so much more they do, I recommend going to the site to see it all. I didn’t even mention their podcasting and media enclosure support, or their ad network. Go!
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Mike,
Followed the link over at SquaredPeg to your blog, nice blog! You are absolutely right about Feedburner. It is the only way to run with RSS.
Also as an FYI (pat yourself on the back) when we first implemented RSS at Wofford before last summer Allegheny was one of the examples that we studied, so good work there!
One additional thing about Feedburner is a tool called Feed Analysis (http://www.blogperfume.com/feed-analysis/). I don’t know if you have seen it before, but it allows you to gain all sorts of additional insight into your RSS feed. The only requirement is you have to open your feed up to the API.