Useful Tips #1: Pointing an existing feed URL at your new FeedBurner URL

It's Day 2 of Pre-Alpha, and we can already declare a clear winner for "most conspicuously absent FAQ entry." If you already syndicate content, your readers are using your current feed's URL in their news readers. How can you painlessly migrate their requests from your old server/feed to your newly burned FeedBurner feed, so all of your syndication traffic takes advantage of our services?

We recommend the procedure below if you have control over security settings for your web server. Also, we use Movable Type in this example as our publishing platform. If you use a hosted service (such as TypePad, Blogspot, or Radio) this procedure won't work for you as written, but there might be workarounds you can explore with your service provider.

1:: Create a new private feed
» Create a new, private feed. This feed will not be publicized anywhere.

» In Movable Type, select Templates from the Manage menu, and then select the template you use to publish your feed. (A likely default template is "index.xml.")

» Change the Output File value from "index.xml" to "fb-index.xml".

» Save, then rebuild, all Index templates.

2:: Burn the new private feed
» In FeedBurner, start a new burned feed by entering the private feed you created in step 1 above into the Feed URL field on FeedBurner's home page.

» Create a URI for your republished feed. FeedBurner will automatically suggest one for you, but you may want to personalize it. For example, if your blog was entitled "History of Hair Bands," you might use "hairbandhist." Rock!

» Apply FeedBurner services you desire and activate the newly burned feed.

3:: Apache users: create an .htaccess file in your blog directory
And now, the tricky part. The following instructions apply to Apache users only.

» Instruct Apache to redirect requests for your old feed to your burned feed. Create an .htaccess file with this single line in it in the directory that contains your old feed. If your published directory is /var/www/host/blogs/hbh, you would enter this line:

Redirect temp /hbh/index.xml http://feeds.feedburner.com/hairbandhist

Notice that we use a temp redirect. This redirect means that feed readers will still access /hbh/hairbandhist.xml and then get redirected. If we used permanent instead, readers would forget the old URL and just use the new URL permanently. In our pre-alpha service phase, we don't yet recommend permanent redirection.

Once you create .htaccess, it takes effect immediately. No server restart required.

4:: Remove the existing feed file
» Finally, delete the old feed file (/var/www/host/blogs/hbh/index.xml) to avoid any confusion.

If you ever wish to suspend redirection to FeedBurner, you can seamlessly point to your private feed without having to expose the private URL by replacing the .htaccess file with something like this:


RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /hbh
RewriteRule ^index\.xml$ fb-index.xml


As you can imagine, we'd like to make this process a LOT simpler for publishers. Look for a service (or a combination of services and plug-ins for publishing platforms) from FeedBurner in the future!