Burned

Some time ago, I used Feedburner to make a new feed for the site. I called it the Superfeed and used their service to add in Flickr photos and del.icio.us bookmarks. However, I found it way too limiting. There were other sources I wanted to add, such as my Netflix notifications and my Ta-da List. While I used it though, I became addicted to their statistics. I could instantly gauge how many people were reading.

The problem was that many people probably weren’t using the Superfeed. I used the stock RSS feed as the official one for a long time and despite making the Superfeed the default (and then switching in another Feedburner feed that was just the blog), I imagine many were still using the old feed (meaning my count was wildly inaccurate). To make matters worse Safari would choose the Atom feed no matter what. I started to cobble a solution together by adding an Atom version of the feed. That wasn’t a complete solution.

I was so relieved to discover a WordPress plugin that would redirect all feeds to your Feedburner feed. It required a little tweaking (there’s a bug if the WordPress installation is in another location), but it seems to have successfully redirected most everyone. I’m not sure about Bloglines as it still says I’m using the old feed (which suggests that Bloglines doesn’t obey 302 permanent redirects correctly; I guess you can’t win them all). Anyway, today’s count is up around 40, a pretty respectable number in my book. I may have to put one of those little chiclets on the main page to brag.