Slightly Remarkable

What FeedBurner Is

FeedBurner is a service. Not a program that you download, but a site you subscribe to, much like Technorati or Bloglines. FeedBurner combines all the RSS and/or Atom feeds your blog has into one feed. When someone, or something, requests this feed, FeedBurner spits out a compatible version.

If you look at my feed in your browser, it appears like any other web page (but with lots of information). This may be the biggest turn-off, since it tends to confuse people, but this page explains how you can utilize an aggregator to subscribe to the feed. Once subscribed, you can open your aggregator to view the latest blog entries from my site. Some aggregators only support specific versions of RSS or Atom, which is why, as I mentioned earlier, FeedBurner is a centralized feed that will automatically convert the feed to a compatible version on-the-fly. This is exceptionally convenient if your blog normally only generates one specific kind of feed and is known as a SmartFeed according to FeedBurner.

What FeedBurner Does

For those of you using a blog system like Wordpress, a number of feeds are generated automatically. This does not, however, eliminate the necessity (or perhaps luxury) of signing up with FeedBurner. In addition to providing a centralized feed, FeedBurner does much more.

As you’ve already seen, my feed is Browser Friendly. Where normally, a feed would appear as an XML document when viewed in the browser, FeedBurner changes the appearance of the feed in the browser to make it easier for one to understand what the page is about. This Browser Friendly setting comes along with a number of options, including three templates (one for podcasts), feed content, and custom information, all of which would be displayed when the feed is viewed in the browser (but not in your aggregator).

Another helpful feature, although I don’t personally use it, is the SmartCast setting, which is for podcasts. This one you’ll need to discover on your own, but it appears to be highly configurable, so if you publish a podcast in addition to text, I’ve no doubt that SmartCast will be a help to you.

Another feature is the Link Splicer. With this setting, you can select from del.icio.us, Furl, or Bloglines Clip Blog, enter your username, and at the end of each day, your bookmarks will appear as a blog entry in the feed (but not on your site). This is really cool, since people won’t have to subscribe to a separate feed anymore to see what you’ve bookmarked each day.

Next in line is the Photo Splicer. This is essentially the same as Link Splicer, except it integrates with services such as Flickr and Buzznet. I’ve no doubt that this is useful for photography blogs.

Other services I won’t go into detail on include the following.

• Geotags: let everyone know where you live.
• Feed Image Burner: more of a self-advertisement, puts a FeedBurner image in your feed.
• Title/Description Burner: lets you customize the title/description of your feed. Useful for bloggers who have no control over this information.
• Convert Format Burner: converts your feed to a specific kind of feed (e.g., RSS 2.0 to RSS 0.92). Careful, this does not work when the SmartFeed feature is active.
• Content-Type Burner: allows you to customize the content-type output of your feed (for advanced users who lack control of their feeds).
• Summary Burner: like the title/description burner, except it allows you to customize the summary of each post, instead of the title/description of the entire feed.

Get the Word Out!

But FeedBurner does more! What else is there? Well, in order for this service to have any practical use, you’ll need some readers. Of course, that means you need to publicize your feed. FeedBurner gives a buttload of options in regard to getting word about your blog out there, and in addition, it gives lots of tips along the way. I’m going to once again list these features concisely, as they aren’t the best part of FeedBurner (we haven’t gotten to that yet).

• BuzzBoost: publish your feed as HTML. Allows you to publish a feed from one site on another site. Helpful for bloggers who have more than one site with related content.
• Headline Animator: an animated GIF image that cycles through your feed’s five most recent items. Great for forums!
• PingShot: notify aggregators when you’ve updated. Useful for those who don’t have customization over what sites are pinged when new entries are published.
• Email Subscriptions powered by FeedBlitz: for people who don’t wish to use an aggregator, they can get an email each time you publish an entry.
• FeedCount: show off how many people are subscribed to your feed with an image (completely customizable).
• Awareness API: external access of traffic data.
• Chicklet Chooser: HTML-generator that creates an image that links to an aggregator and subscribes to your feed.
• Password Protector: for those of you who want a specific audience, you can password protect the feed in order to ensure that only a few users can read it.
• Creative Commons: make sure everyone knows just what they can legally do with your content.

What? Who? When? Where?

Now that you’ve spread the word about your blog, gotten readers to subscribe to your feed, and customized your feed to best suit your readers, you need (or perhaps want) to analyze. Just how many people are subscribed, and what are they subscribed with?

Daily Circulation Trend: the feed circulation feature tells you how many people have subscribed to your feed within the past 24 hours. You can also select “earliest to date” which will bring up a chart and show you trends and so forth. Pretty cool, huh?

Readership: this is my favorite feature of FeedBurner. This feature will show you a pie chart of how many users are subscribed with each aggregator. It’s a beautiful chart, too…

There are more analyzing options available to Pro users, but you’ll have to decide for yourself if those features are worth paying for. Personally, I’m satisfied with what’s free.

But I Want Money!

Finally, there is the last feature I’ll discuss, which is what FeedBurner calls “monetizing” — “a fancy term for adding revenue-generating services to your feed.”

First, FeedBurner can automatically insert your Google Ads between blog entries (or, if you want, between X number of blog entries) for you. All you have to do is have a Google AdSense account, have permission from Google to put ads in your feeds, insert your client ID, and activate the service. Simple, easy, and fast.

The only other way to make money aside from ads would be through Amazon. You can tell FeedBurner to process any catalog links to Amazon and insert your Associates ID.

Whew, finally…

In conclusion, be skeptical of services to filter out the bad or useless ones, but don’t be so critical to the point of never giving the service a chance to begin with. If you’re not sure what a service is, does, or why it exists, search the Web to find an article something like mine. Typically, the site itself does a poor job of conveying what, exactly, their service is and what it does. (Actually, that may be more on the part of the reader, but a second account from some random blog somewhere may help you to understand better — a walk-through of “how to use such-and-such service” is generally most helpful.)

For those of you who signed up because of this tutorial, to try it out and see if you like it, if you’re having problems, don’t forget that you can always “troubleshootize.” And when that doesn’t work, you can, uh, “ask-in-the-forum-ize.” Have fun!