Please do not use Feedburner service

Written by
Date: 2012-12-07 17:29:35 00:00


Years ago, this Feedburner fever appeared, all blogs wanted to have the readers counter.

Some time ago, some bloggers realized that Feedburner was indeed hijacking their links.

Take Ostatic.com as an example.

  • Real link: http://ostatic.com/blog/gnome-legacy-mode-begins-to-take-shape
  • Feedburner link: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ostatic/~3/-tQbPVxd-EQ/story01.htm

I follow Ostatic and other blogs using RSS, if I want to save links for future reading in pinboard or a read-later app, I have to actually find the real link. Usually clicking on the home of the site, and then clicking again on the post I want to save, otherwise I will be saving the feedproxy link.

Why is this bad?

First of all, Google controls your links, everyone who saves your links using an RSS reader (like reeder for iPad) will have to go trough Google servers in order to reach YOUR content.

What if Google decides that they do not want to forward anything to you anymore?. What if they decide to charge you (or the reader) for the redirection service?

What if other company buys Feedburner, and suddenly decide to shut it down the complete service.

Own your content

I have read about this all over the web, even in blogs that uses feedburner. You really need to own, your content. Try to have everybody bookmarking your links, not proxies' links or short-url services' links.

Some savvy sites that uses Feedburner

  • Techcrunch
  • TheNextWeb
  • Arstechnica

I like to show you some that don't

  • Github
  • Dropbox

Please stop using intermediates to distribute your content

RSS is a great standard, one a lot of people still use to read and follow content all around the web. Bloggers, conquer back your links, use the native RSS of your blog, and do not redirect it to others, do not let others posses your content.

Edited on: Dec 9, 2012.

This post have gotten some attention on Hacker News Discussion here.

Matt Cutts pointed my to this (Edit: 2013-05-23: I removed the link as it is now a broken link), which explains how you can use your own domain instead of feedproxy's one to share your feeds.

I still see a problem as Feedproxy still changes your url. You are in control of your content as your links will be somethig like this:

http://feeds.mattcutts.com/~r/mattcutts/uJBW/~3/8IurStR5fXw/

instead of this:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pubcon-2012-slides/

The problem I see is that if the service goes down, you need to create a table with 301 redirects to enable all those who bookmarked your feedburner's touched links to access your content.

But if you still want to use feedburner, then that also seems to have a solution. Just disable click tracking, you can read how here