Life is grand

With Google buying FeedBurner more than a few people are having cadenzas over Google’s growing understanding of your digital life.

Fair enough, you have a right to worry yourself sick (I just hope my taxes aren’t paying for your ulcer treatments.)

All I can say is that if you worry about this, produce a feed and want FeedBurner features then just redirect. It is dead easy if you run a WordPress powered blog as you can use the FeedBurner plugin FeedSmith.

If you don’t use WordPress then use a 301 redirect. Create a FeedBurner feed, link it to a non-published feed off of your site. Then using your web-server redirect hits on your site’s published feed to the FeedBurner feed.

e.g. I have a FeedBurner feed, http://feeds.feedburner.com/paulmwatson/journal, that siphons a hidden feed on my domain. You on the other hand subscribe to http://paulmwatson.com/journal/feed. Not to the FeedBurner URL. Technically FeedBurner is sending you the data for http://paulmwatson.com/journal/feed but I maintain control of the subscription URL.

Using this you can at any point stop using FeedBurner but your subscribers won’t have to change a thing. They probably won’t even notice.

So when Google turn evil you won’t have to worry much and you can swap to using their replacement, whomever that may be.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 24th, 2007 at 11:34 am and is filed under Post. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.