How FeedBurner Rewrites Links

Fri, 27 May 2005 10:51:26 CDT

I've been meaning to write this post for a while ... it probably belongs somewhere on the FeedBurner site, but I'll just put it here for now. I wanted to document exactly how and when FeedBurner will rewrite elements in feeds. First thing you might be thinking is "Why is FeedBurner rewriting links?" Well, one of the service that we offer to publishers is "clickthrough tracking", where we report the number of clickthroughs on a per-item basis. To do this, we rewrite the URL associated with the item and when it's clicked on, we log the click and then forward it on to the original item URL. The second thing you need to know is that we never rewrite the element in an RSS 2.0 feed, although we may switch the isPermaLink attribute from "true" to "false" in some cases. The guid element is used in many cases to unique identify a feed element, and we don't want to mess with that. Last thing to know is that if we ever rewrite the link to an item, we'll stick the original value of the link in a element, which is useful for some search engines and other...

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Sat, 04 Jun 2005 16:29:32 CDT

Eric Lunt: Atom: Not much to say here. That's a good thing....

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How FeedBurner Rewrites Links

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