Safely using FeedBurner
Wednesday, July 9th, 2008So you have some feeds and you want to track subscriptions using FeedBurner.
The problem?
FeedBurner is a great service and probably will stay that way since it was recently acuired by google. However, it is still a 3rd-party service and that’s somthing you should always be worried about.
You see, when someone subscribes to a burned feed, they will be pointing the agregator to: <feeds.feedburner.com/your-feed>. This means that you will loose all of your subscribers if any of the following happens:
- FeedBurner goes down, closes shop, or starts charging an outrageous fee. (unlikely)
- The person who set up the account forgets the password, or becomes a disgruntled employee. (possible)
- A better service comes along and you decide to switch. (very likley)
The solution
The simple solution is to have users subscribe to a feed on your domain.
- Create a folder structure for the feeds - like: /feeds/news/ and /feeds/videos.
- In each folder create an index page using you favorite server-side language - index.php, index.cfm, etc. This gives us added flexibility. We can even change the language at a later date!
- Use this page to mirror the FeedBurner feed. below is an example in ColdFusion. In PHP you will want to look into cURL:
<!----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- This is a placeholder for a feed.
- Make sure to link to the folder and not this .cfm page for even more flexibility.
- Created: 2008-04-09 Gabriel McGovern
- Modified:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------->
<cfhttp url="http://feeds.feedburner.com/pcc-videos/">
<cfoutput>#cfhttp.filecontent#</cfoutput>
Examples
Check out the feeds we offer for Portland Community College. Each is being run through FeedBurner, but you subscribe to a URL in our domain. If we decide to change services - all we have to do is update the index page. You as a subscriber would never even have to know.
Gene smith
The original 