Feeds for thought

When I set up this new home for the AmeriNZ Podcast, I used FeedBurner to manage my RSS feed for iTunes so that I could host my podcast anywhere, and also so I could move it to a new host. Previously, when my podcast was hosted at Podomatic, I couldn’t change my feed address and I was stuck with their “service” (which is why I moved it).

Google bought FeedBurner in June 2007 and has been integrating the services ever since. As of February 28, they’re moving all FeedBurner accounts to Google accounts (there’s a way to opt out for people who want to burn their own feeds). The rest of us with FeedBurner accounts needed to set up a Google Account and transfer our feed(s) to it.

The completely Google version of FeedBurner has dropped some of the stats that used to be included because the stats are part of Google Analytics; you need an account with that in order to still get stats on site visitors and stuff. The good news is that there’s a lot more information available than FeedBurner used to supply. The bad news is that it took me several frustrating tries to get it to work for this site, though on the third or fourth try it did.

The trouble I had getting Google Analytics to work is similar to the trouble I’ve had getting various WordPress plug-ins to work, and the cause is the same: I don’t understand HTML. That’s why I used FeedBurner in the first place—I wouldn’t have the slightest idea where to begin to create my own feed.

Google’s online documentation for the change isn’t as clear as it could be, but it doesn’t really matter because Google’s transferring process works exactly as it’s supposed to. My moving process, granted with only four feeds, took less than two minutes.

It turns out there’s only a slight difference: They added a “2” to the feed address, which is now:

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/amerinzpodcast

That’s the address to use if you want to subscribe directly to the same feed that goes to iTunes (doing that lets you opt out of iTunes if you want to use another service/RSS reader). The old feed should re-direct indefinitely, but anyone who uses it may want to update their subscription.

So, the process is complete and everything seems to be working. If you have any trouble accessing items in my feed, let me know.

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