Tobold's Blog
Wednesday, August 01, 2007
 
Feedburner

Following the advice from my readers, I just switched my RSS feed over to Feedburner. You *should* be redirected automatically to the new feed. If not, the new feed address is

http://feeds.feedburner.com/ToboldsBlog

Please tell me if that works better, worse, or identical as before.
Comments:
Uhm, well I don't notice any difference. Not this nor the last time you changed the RSS feed. :)

Using Firefox if that matters.
 
I hate Feeburner because they embed tracking images, which really slows down rendering of a feed that would otherwise have been completely downloaded in the background. I hope whatever you're getting out of them is worth giving all your readers even more web bugs.
 
What I get out of Feedburner is knowing how many people read my site via the feed. Previously I only had the first paragraph in the feed, so people were forced to visit the site itself if they wanted the full article, because only by visiting the site were they counted.

Knowing how many people are reading my blog, and what they are interested in, is important for me. If I thought nobody was reading this, I wouldn't continue writing. So I need to see my trafic regardless of whether you go to the blog directly or just read the feed.

I would think the guys from Feedburner would object to you calling their service a "web bug". How slow can your connection be? Even with the tracking image my text-heavy content with few or no images should download lightning quick to anywhere. Much faster than just opening the front page of any commercial gaming site, which floods you with lots of graphics.
 
Well of course they might object to the term web bug, but that is exactly what it is; they even go the extra step and attach a cookie to it. And it's not even a question of my connection speed, since my reason for going to read a feed might specifically be because I'm maxing it out downloading a video podcast, but rather the whole problem of how RSS feeds with embedded images are managed.

I normally like to store old articles locally for a week, but I can't do that anymore because another feed with a lot of posts per day (software releases) switched to Feedburner. That means every time I tried to look at an update my reader went to load hundreds of web bugs with unnaturally brief cache times. What should have been an instant display of a feed that was downloaded hours ago suddenly becomes a huge wait for all those Feedburner server requests to complete.

Maybe I just have a sucky feed reader, but maybe slapping a web bug on every post in a feed is a stupid idea. Either way, it undermines your ability to track the stats you indicate, because you can't really say that loading the web bug is the same thing as tracking individual article readership.

Personally, I'm fine just getting a headline and abstract in a feed. I use a feed to let me know what's new, not simply to avoid going to a site. Use whatever you prefer when offering a feed, but just be aware going into it that you may not end up getting what you hope to be getting.
 
I've had good experience with Feedburner. I'm particularly happy that after Google purchased them, their site statistics are now free.
 
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