Dancing About Architecture

I wanted to clear a couple of things up about the Redirecting Guy post. First, FeedBurner feeds never "expire": once you have a FeedBurner URL, it's yours until you explicitly delete it. Second, if you do decide to delete your FeedBurner feed, you can select the "30-day Redirect" option, which goes through the following steps:

Day 1-10: Any requests for the FeedBurner feed are sent an HTTP 301 "Permanent Redirect" response back to your source feed. This will cause most feed readers to forget the FeedBurner URL and use the new URL from that point on. Your subscribers don't feel a thing.

Day 11-20: If your FeedBurner feed is still getting requests at this point, it probably means that your feed reader is treating that "Permanent Redirect" as a "Temporary Redirect". That's actually pretty common, so now we enter "Phase 2". Now, any requests for your FeedBurner feed will receive a "redirect document". What is a redirect document? Dave Winer displayed foresight by anticipating this need back in 2002 and provided this specification so that a publisher could keep control of their feed location. We strongly encourage more feed readers to support this specification, and we are going to be widely campaigning for this capability.

Day 21-30: You're still here? Well, at this point we return a valid feed that contains a single item that says "This feed has moved to (feed URL here)". So even though all of the transparent mechanisms to redirect the subscription have failed, there's still a trail for your subscribers to follow.

After Day 30, your feed is deleted and that URL is up for grabs. If you would like to extend this time period beyond 30 days, however, just drop us a note to feedback [at] feedburner.com and we'd be happy to extend this redirect period indefinitely. We've done that for lots of publishers.

Mike's point is valid: as a publisher, you should be aware that if you delete your FeedBurner feed you are also releasing your claim to that particular URL, just like what happens if you give up a domain name or a delete a blog on a hosted service. We have provided the tools (through redirection, MyBrand, and the 30-day Delete process) to ensure that publishers maintain complete control over their feed, but we always welcome feedback and suggestions for improvement!