Maria’s Guides

A realize that I messed up the Maria’s Guides feeds and fix them. Sort of.

I’ve been using FeedBurner for a few years now — although I’m not 100% sure why anymore. The service enables you to add features to an RSS feed that [supposedly] makes them better. What I like most about FeedBurner is the ability to track the number of feed subscribers. I’m a stats nut and being able to quantify my blog’s impact makes me feel good.

A FeedBurner Primer

Here’s how FeedBurner works. You go to the FeedBurner Web site and enter the URL for a feed you want to “burn.” This brings the feed into FeedBurner so you can add its features. You then publish the FeedBurner URL for the feed and encourage visitors to use that to subscribe.

So, for example, this site’s WordPress-generated feed is http://www.mariasguides.com/feed. But it’s FeedBurner feed URL is http://feeds.feedburner.com/MariasGuides.

Notice how I made the second URL a hyperlink and not the first one? That’s because I want you to subscribe to the FeedBurner feed (if you’d like to subscribe) but not the WordPress feed.

Two Feeds, Same Content

And that’s where the problem starts. By using FeedBurner, I have [at least] two feeds. And that screws up the stats capabilities of FeedBurner — my favorite feature, if you recall — because FeedBurner can only count the subscribers to its feed.

The solution, therefore, is to redirect the WordPress feed to the FeedBurner feed. And the folks at FeedBurner have a WordPress plugin that’ll do just that: the FeedBurner Feedsmith Plugin 2.3. This plugin, once installed and activated, enables you to enter the URL for your WordPress feed and the URL for your FeedBurner feed. It then does what it needs to to make sure everyone who asks for the WordPress feed you entered is automatically directed to the corresponding FeedBurner feed that you entered.

Not a Good Enough Solution

Unfortunately, this plugin does only part of the job I need done for Maria’s Guides. This site has separate feeds for each book support category. If I used the plugin, it would only redirect the main FeedBurner feed. Or, worse yet, redirect all category feeds to the main FeedBurner feed. (I admit that I don’t know what it would do because I haven’t tried it. I do know that it won’t meet all of my needs.)

Enter .htaccess

Of course, I had the same problem back when all this content was on An Eclectic Mind. Back then, I solved it by directing about 95% of site traffic to the appropriate FeedBurner feed. (That was close enough for me.) I did all this with redirect statements in my site’s .htaccess file. I even gloated about the success here.

Trouble is, I didn’t keep a copy of the .htaccess file. And I didn’t write an article, in detail, stating how I solved the problem. (I was probably afraid of opening the floodgates to people with .htaccess questions, most of which I’m sure I couldn’t answer. I don’t know enough about .htaccess to help other people. Hell, I had to buy a book to learn enough to solve my own problem.

You can probably figure out what comes next. The .htaccess file I’d so carefully crafted almost a year ago was lost. It was some weird server problem that caused me to overwrite the existing file with a blank copy. No problem, I figured. I’ll just use the backup copy. But there was no backup. When I used Fetch to back up the contents of my Web site’s main folder (as we should all do periodically), the .htaccess file wasn’t copied. Probably because it’s invisible.

Back to the Coding Board

So I had to start at square one.

I recreated the redirect instructions that would send subscribers to the FeedBurner feeds as necessary. It was remarkably easy. I even tested each one. It worked — when I entered my WordPress feed address, it automatically displayed the FeedBurner feed.

Unfortunately, it was wrong.

My redirects also redirected FeedBurner, which needed to read the original feed to keep its own feed up-to-date. So FeedBurner was unable to get up-to-date information and thus, its feed wasn’t up-to-date. And because of the redirect, I’d made it impossible for anyone to get the up-to-date content, no matter which URL they used.

As you can imagine, I turned all those commands off. Everything now works, although I still have the original problem of not being able to redirect subscribers to the FeedBurner feeds.

Help from FeedBurner? Not!

I went back to the FeedBurner forums to get assistance with my problem. I did a search and found someone who had the same problem I had — multiple feeds from the same WordPress blog being pointed to FeedBurner. He asked the question I would have asked.

Great, I thought to myself. I won’t have to reinvent my wheel. I can use someone else’s.

But the response from FeedBurner’s support staff was sobering. They said it was an .htaccess problem, not a FeedBurner problem. They couldn’t help. And they pointed the poor guy (and me and probably countless others) back to the support post I’d found about a year ago. It was written to help someone with a TypePad redirect issue and had evolved to disjointed WordPress support. I had spent quite some time studying the code before coming up with my solution.

It appeared I was going to be repeating that exercise.

Is it Worth It?

Which makes me wonder if it’s worth using FeedBurner at all. What’s the benefit?

Other than the counter, the only real benefit is the ability to include Google ads in my feed. I tried this out (briefly) and was not impressed. The ad was huge and placement was poor. (I think I can fix the placement problem.) So I turned it off. People don’t read my blogs to look at ads, so I’m pretty careful about how I place them. I know how much I hate looking at ads. Although it would be nice to get a few clicks to help cover hosting costs, etc., I can live without them.

Back in the old days — a year or two ago — some of FeedBurner’s features were extremely useful. They helped make feeds more readable by Web browsers in the days before RSS feeds gained so much popularity. But now, with every modern browser capable of reading any RSS feed? Who knows.

For now, I’m just not going to deal with it.