Posts Tagged ‘syndication’
Posted on September 19, 2008 - by Jonathan Davies
Feedburner: a blogger’s best friend
If you’re a blogger then you should be using Feedburner; a very powerful RSS publishing platform now owned by Google. The service is used by thousands of bloggers from around the world so that ten times that can read their content from the comfort of their own feed reader.
Feedburner has received much praise for its massive feature set but also criticism for its sometimes unreliable stats recording.
In this article I will be looking at some of the more interesting and popular features of Feedburner, but also the inevitable handicaps that a service is its scale naturally has.
Fantastic Features
- Easy set up - I wish most web services were so easy to configure. Once you have signed up for an account you simply put in your website URL on the front page and press next. You then, simply put in a couple of extra bits of information about your feed and the feed URL. That is how easy it should be to set up any web service you want to use.
- In for the long run - As I mentioned previously, Feedburner was acquired by Google not to long ago. Luckily for all its users, as if it were to go away so would all your subscribers. Now that they are owned by Google, we can we sure that the feeds will be accessible for a very, very long time.
- Adsense Integration - If you want to earn some money off the lazy lot who don’t bother to come to your site then Feedburner has a tool for you that easily ad a couple of adsense content and image ads.
- Its Free! - Best of all you can get everything that Feedburner offers without spending a dime. Though this wasn’t originally the case, since the Google purchase all the pro features are available to you.
Possible Problems
- Dependence - If you start to get a lot of people subscribed to your feed and Feedburner does something horrible that you don’t agree with, (like put in their terms of use that they own all your content) you are still kind of tied into the service unless you don’t mind leaving your readers out in the cold.
- Unreliable stats - One problem I hear all the time from people using Feedburner is that their stats don’t always make sense, or sometime they drop to zero every so often. If you need really reliable stats for advertisers etc, this might be a problem, even if it doesn’t happen very often.
- Web UI not great - When I say “not great” I mean it isn’t as good as it could be. Sometime things don’t seem to be in the right place or are not entirely obvious. There is some room for improvement here, some novice users might find it a bit hard to get their heads round at first. That said, there are some great guides to Feedburner out there.
From the horse’s mouth
Blogging Adventure uses Feedburner and so does my personal blog. For the year that I have been using it, I have had relatively little issues with the service and plan on using it for the foreseeable future.
The features that you’ll find me using are the email subscriptions, Feed ads and the chicklets.
If you’ve never used or heard of Feedburner before I recommend that you check it out and see if it can enhance your website or blog.
The Question For You:
If you use Feedburner why do you like it and what features do you like about it? Are you worried about the changes that Google has made the the advertising?
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