Burning Questions - The Official FeedBurner Weblog

VFAQs

As more and more publishers use FeedBurner to enhance their feeds, a number of questions keep coming up. Most of these questions can be found by looking through this blog here, but we realize that using a blog as a proxy for a support forum is kind of a short-term hack (we're working on it!).

So, here are three Very Frequently Asked Questions that we receive often, all bundled up into one entry.

1. Can FeedBurner convert my Atom feed to RSS?
2. Do I have to give up control of my feed to use FeedBurner?
3. Why don't new items show up right away in my burned feed?

Here are the answers to some Very Frequently Asked Questions:

1. Can FeedBurner convert my Atom feed to RSS?

Yes! We get this question a lot from Blogger users. There are a number of different feed formats in use today, and some feed readers only support a subset of those formats. Since Atom is the newest feed format on the scene, a number of readers have not yet added support for this format. This can be frustrating for publishers that want to reach the largest audience possible.

FeedBurner can help in two different ways. The most common and recommended way for "converting" your Atom feed is to use our SmartFeed service. This service lets your Atom feed "pass through" unmodified for readers that support the Atom format, but it converts the feed to RSS 2.0 "on the fly" for readers that do not support the Atom format. You get the best of both worlds: you can use the lastest features of the Atom feed format, but you still support legacy readers that are still very prevalent out there.

The other way that FeedBurner can help is if you know you only want an RSS 1.0 or RSS 2.0 feed. If that's the case, you can use the "Convert Format Burner" service and select the feed format you'd like to use.

Please note that using both SmartFeed and Convert Format is silly but generally harmless, and we now provide a detailed message when you attempt to use both at the same time.

2. Do I have to change my feed url to use FeedBurner?

No! Some publishers are a bit wary of changing their feed URL: that is, they'd prefer to keep the URL of the feed on their own domain for any number of reasons. Here's a tip for how to use FeedBurner while keeping your existing feed URL. This tip only works if you have control over the HTTP directives for your site. The procedure for pointing your existing feed to the burned version of the feed is actually detailed here. I wanted to provide a little more detail here, and call your attention to a "gotcha".

Here's an illustration of what's going on. Please excuse the minimalist PowerPoint diagrams. You start out with the readers hitting your feed as usual:

Now, next step is to generate your feed to a different file name (shown as fb-index.xml in this example) and you point FeedBurner at that new file. Then, you use your web server to redirect any access for the original file (index.xml) to the feeds.feedburner.com URL.

You have now maintained control of your feed. If you decide that you don't like FeedBurner, you can either change the redirect to your private feed (index.xml goes to fb-index.xml) or you can just go back to generating your feed to the original file (index.xml) and get rid of the redirects.

One gotcha: please remember to point FeedBurner at the new, private feed URL! If you instead point FeedBurner at the original URL, everything will go around in a big circle as FeedBurner attempt to read your source feed, which points to the Feedburner feed, which points to the source feed, and on and on.

Now, we actually trap this condition so it's not too terrible: we will just serve up the last content we were able to grab. But if you do this redirect trick and it looks like your feed isn't being updated, make sure you haven't fallen prey to this infinite redirect monster.

3. Why don't new items show up right away in my burned feed?

One of the nice features of FeedBurner is that we field all of the requests for your feed, which can save you a bunch of bandwidth. Instead of passing each request through to your site, we instead "cache" the feed on our servers. Every 30 minutes, FeedBurner will check back with your site to make sure that we have the latest version of your content.

"30 minutes!" you cry. "The world could change in 30 minutes. I need that burned feed updated immediately!". Fear not. You can also "ping" FeedBurner to say "Hey, my feed has been updated, so get the new copy right away". You can do this by pinging FeedBurner directly or by using the Ping-o-Matic service.

Posted by Eric at August 10, 2004 09:38 AM | TrackBack | Post A Comment | Email This Post