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I’ve been using Feedburner for my blog RSS Feeds since 2005! It was one of a few good free options in the early days of blogging. Shortly after Feedburner was acquired by Google in 207, there started to be complaints about the way it was managing the transition and handling subscriber stats. It is time to self-host your RSS feed many people wondered? Rumors that Google will close Feedburner are circulating again, but this time there is an option for an RSS hosting service, although not free.
Maddie Grant at Social Fish published this guest post by Phil Hollows at Feedblitz:
If you are currently using Feedburner for your RSS feeds, you may have noticed – as we did – that your blog feed is totally dead. (Easiest way to check this – subscribe to your own blog in Google Reader, and see if it’s pulling the latest content.) If your Feedburner feed is not working anymore, you’re not alone and you basically have two choices – switch to your blog platform’s atom feed for free (no analytics), or switch to the best alternative, Feedblitz for a small fee. So when I got an introduction to Phil Hollows at Feedblitz, I asked if he would write up a post to explain how to switch. Thank you so much Phil!
Although my feed is still working, I’m working with Rad Campaign on a blog redesign as part of the launch of my next book, Measuring the Networked Nonprofit. The last thing I need to deal with an RSS mess, so having my web developer fix it for me. According to the post that Phil wrote, the migration process ports over your subscribers and it looks like FeedBlitz has some great features too. And, we know right now they won’t be closing.
1) Update your web site’s RSS autodiscovery tags to point to your native blog’s feed.
So if your blog is at example.com, your advertised RSS feed would be something like example.com/feed and NOT feeds.feedburner.com/example. This means that new subscribers always follow a feed on your domain, not your RSS provider’s platform. You can then use plugins, redirects, .htaccess files or DNS CNAME entries to get FeedBurner (and later, FeedBlitz) to serve that particular feed. Read more on this topic here: http://www.feedblitz.com/one-thing-to-do-to-get-your-rss-right/
2) Set up your account at FeedBlitz and start your 30-day trial (you’ll need a valid major credit or debit card);
3) Tell FeedBlitz about your FeedBurner account;
4) Let FeedBlitz migrate your email and RSS over;
5) Update your web site – autodiscovery tags, plugins, theme settings etc. – to reflect the change in feed service.
6) Quit FeedBurner!
Here are two resources that help you make the switch, both technically and customer service point of view
FeedBurner Migration Guide – http://www.feedblitz.com/the-feedburner-migration-guide/
How I Made The Switch – http://janefriedman.com/2012/08/01/why-i-stopped-using-feedburner-to-serve-my-blog-subscribers/
How are you managing your RSS feeds for your blog or web site? Will you impacted if Feedburner closes? Ready to migrate?
