Are Your FeedBurner Feeds Discovered?

By on February 21, 2006 in RSS Feeds with 31 Comments

If you’re using FeedBurner to track your feeds, are you sure that’s how readers are subscribing? Look again. Even Seth Godin may have some tweaks to make.

Before writing on FeedDemon 2.0, I decided to delete all feeds and start from scratch (I’ll explain why when I post about FeedDemon).  I noticed an interesting trend that you may want to check before IE 7.0 fully launches. An auto-discovery doesn’t pick up FeedBurner feeds unless you make some simple changes.

As you probably know, Microsoft IE 7.0 (also in beta)  is able to auto-discover feeds. Firefox, Safari and most news aggregators already do this. But which of your feeds are they detecting?

David Lorenzo at Career Intensity found conflicting reports recently when looking his Bloglines subscribers. Bloglines was detecting three feeds – none of them FeedBurner. I had similar challenges with Copywriting Watch until I read a post by Rachel Cunliffe.

Though Rachel specializes in WordPress, it directed me to the FeedBurner Forums for some help with TypePad. The solution is pretty easy (and found below). Later this week, I may brave the instructions on how to convert older subscriptions over to the FeedBurner feed seamlessly.

Some popular blogs may want to look at this. For instance, Steve Rubel has a single feed button on his blog, by FeedBurner. However, the auto-discovery doesn’t see the FeedBurner feed, only the default Atom and RSS feeds. If Steve is tracking numbers with FeedBurner, it’s not accurate.

If Steve wants all feed discoveries to see his FeedBurner feed, a simple adjustment to this code in his "head" section will do the trick.

Change this:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom" href=http://www.micropersuasion.com/atom.xml" />

to this:

<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="Atom" href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/MicroPersuasion" />

Guy Kawasaki, Lisa Haneberg, Michelle Miller, Neville Hobson, and Peter Decker each have the same challenge.

Repeat the steps with each type of feed.

For me, with so many tools using feed discovery, I’d like to keep an accurate count of subscribers. This fix allows for that.

I’m not a big code guy, I don’t understand OPML (which may be where it’s all headed) – so if I’m wrong, call me on it. Maybe we should Ask Dave Taylor. Is this even necessary?

Technorati Tags: , FeedDemon, , , IE 7.0, OPML

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  • http://blog.guykawasaki.com Guy Kawasaki

    Thanks for pointing this out. I’ll ask my IT buddy to look into it. I don’t understand this stuff at all.
    Guy

  • http://www.mikesansone.com Mike Sansone

    Great Guy, let us know what you find out. I’ll buy the Panera coffee for you & your IT guy.

  • http://www.careerintensity.com/blog Dave Lorenzo

    Thanks for your help, Tom.
    The bottom line is that there are more people reading than we think…and that’s a good thing.
    Blogs help make us all better at what we do and you play a big role in that process.

  • http://www.careerintensity.com/blog Dave Lorenzo

    Sorry.I mean Mike.
    Too many comments and I’m too quick on the trigger. Tom helped me with another WordPress problem today.
    As this medium evolves some of us need more help than others and Mike is a great resource. I need to come to Iowa and take the blog course!

  • http://www.marketingmonger.com Eric Mattson

    Thanks, Mike. Great stuff.
    Here’s a tip of my own in return. You should really start tagging your posts with Technorati.
    I’m deriving a decent amount of traffic from it and it’s very easy to do.
    Take a look at MarketingMonger.com to see how it’s done.
    Take care,
    Eric

  • http://www.mikesansone.com Mike Sansone

    Thanks for the kind words, Dave. And have Tom drop me a note as I’m on the hunt for a few WordPress experts.

  • http://www.mikesansone.com Mike Sansone

    Eric, great tip on Technorati. When I first started blogging, I didn’t quite understand the benefit, but since using it, I’ve seen quite a bit of traffic coming from there.
    Keep up the great work and thanks for the encouragement.

  • http://tailrank.com Kevin Burton

    Yeah…. good post. This is exactly what I meant. If you don’t update your autodiscovery header then it won’t work.
    Kevin

  • http://coderseye.com Bruce Kroeze

    If you are using WordPress, the easiest & cleanest solution is to use the feedburner replacement plugin.
    It automatically redirects all feed traffic to your feedburner feed, so you get all your current subscribers accounted-for in feedburner and you don’t have to edit your template or header at all.
    Autodiscovery works perfectly as well. I’m not the author, just a happy user.
    ttp://orderedlist.com/articles/wordpress-feedburner-plugin/

  • http://www.mikesansone.com Mike Sansone

    Bruce – Thanks for the great tip and link for WP blogs.
    Eric Olsen left a great comment at http://www.feedblog.org on how to redirect for those with access to their .htaccess file.
    http://www.feedblog.org/2006/02/howto_setup_aut.html#comments

  • http://www.adbloggers.com Ron Wilson

    Thanks for the tip. I will make the change. I have started using feedburner a few days ago and I truly love it.

  • http://www.mikesansone.com Mike Sansone

    With pleasure Ron. Go get’em!

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    Sweet tip! Thanks, Mike!

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