Please do not use Feedburner service | Hacker News Reader

Please do not use Feedburner service

garron.me

63 pointsurlwolf28 comments

I debunked this months ago here on Hacker News: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4215474

Here's more info: http://support.google.com/feedburner/answer/79590?hl=en

The short version is that FeedBurner has a free feature called MyBrand which serves your feeds from a CNAME of your own domain. Then if you choose to leave FeedBurner, you still have full control of your feeds and permalinks. I set it up on my own domain years ago as feeds.mattcutts.com, for example.

I think this free feature of FeedBurner is one that everyone should use so that you keep feeds under your own control and served off your own domain.

If I recall correctly, as an independent company Feedburner charged a modest fee for CNAME feeds.

Once Google acquired Feedburner, Google made the feature free.

I'm pretty sure the consumer got a nice win here.

Hi Matt, first thanks for getting the time to read my post, and replay. The problem I still see is that even if you have your domain the link is messed up. From your blog.

http://feeds.mattcutts.com/~r/mattcutts/uJBW/~3/8IurStR5fXw/

Goes to

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/pubcon-2012-slides/

So if I bookmark the former, and FB dissapear you will have to create a full list of 301 redirects in your server so my links still work. Yes you have the control, but that is a lot of work.

Why not make FB links like this?

http://feeds.mattcutts.com/blog/pubcon-2012-slides/

In that case all you have to do is a 301 of feeds to www.

Hope my point is clear.

Edit: never mind. Someone found this http://www.wangarific.com/how-to-get-rid-of-feedproxy-links-...

That way you really have all the control back.

Two minute search: http://www.wangarific.com/how-to-get-rid-of-feedproxy-links-...

TL;DR: disable click tracking.

Glad I could help!

It isn't even on by default. I signed up recently (just remembering that Feedburner did this thing with feed statistics, not knowing that they had removed the API) and it had a specific warning along the lines of "enabling this option will modify the content of your feed"

It seems weird that he uses blog-centric companies (TechCrunch, etc) as examples of companies that do, and non-blog-centric companies (GitHub, etc) as examples that don't.

TechCrunch/etc cares about the statistics FeedBurner offers since that is their core product, whereas GitHub/etc probably don't care that much.

Exactly right. I think the post is wrong, so I might be bias, but the examples were rather lacking.

Why? Just because every other time people gave complete control over their data and content it turned out be a bad idea and the the internet itself was invented to avoid this problem?

But it's different now, the companies involved are the ones I've read about since I was young and are therefore trustworthy and permanent. I know older people thought the same thing and turned out to be wrong every single time, but this time it's different. Why is it different? Uh ... I'll get back to you on that.

The same applies to all of the link shorteners too. I've often wondered how much of the web would break if TinyUrl and Bit.ly closed.

This kind of already happened, in 2009: the URL shortener tr.im closed. Once in a while I still run across a broken tr.im link.

https://www.macworld.com/article/1142188/trim_twitter.html

There are many reasons not to use shorteners. There is also the matter of tracking where anyone can do everything to protect people's privacy, but if they got there through an URL-shortener, they're SOL.

I often think about the implications of using Google Analytics on my sites (I use the less unsafe anonymity IP detection"), but those concerns all go out the window, if they got there by shorturl.

I am surprised that third-party URL shorteners aren't time-limited by default. Why would you use a short URL for a long-lived link?

For a serious blogger, Feedburner is a great way to reduce the traffic on your server. Many RSS readers are poorly developed and will hammer your server for no reason. Jeff Atwood wrote a great article about this a while back: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2007/03/reducing-your-websi...

This is a bit of an old discussion.

I think it's a fair tradeoff for content-centric companies to have feedburner (now google) rewrite those links to get some very useful stats in return. This was already happening pre-acquisition and only got better afterwards.

Links get indexed quicker and get submitted to reader / google news for free.

Is there some kind of analytics service that google provides with this? If so, can you turn it off?

Yes and yes.

The whole reason for existence of FeedBurner is analytics. The links are used to track clicks; you can turn it off.

I've never seen this happen -- at least with CNAME'd feeds. Can anyone else confirm?

This is an option that allows tracking clicks on the links. I believe it was turned off by default when I signed up.

http://i.imgur.com/MqMBS.png

I prefer Feedburner links because all they do is redirect. I have no problems with the t.co redirect that Twitter has. It's the same thing.

By all means provide an RSS feed on your site. But Feedburner can help get your pages indexed in Google (and other search engines).

Is that difficult without Feedburner?

Does anyone have any experience with some FeedBurner competitors that they'd recommend? I'd be happy to pay.

I work at FeedBlitz and we have support (giant improvement over FeedBurner), analytics, integration with other social media for RSS distribution, easy-to-enable triggers and parsers to make the RSS part of integrated marketing communications.

Zero evidence, no credible reason not to use it. Suggesting that Google might sell feedburner to someone who then shuts it down is laughable.

Is it? Google does not seem to be spending any resources on improving the product and they recently disabled the ability to show ads in your feed (which is presumably the whole reason Google got into this business in the first place).

That rather shortsighted. All companies, as well as governments, eventually hit financial trouble, and some day fail.

Google has shut down many services and "broke the internet" before - what they essentially did with Reader.

Even if it takes 100 years, we don't want the internet archives to be broken.

I think it's shortsighted to design your architecture for Google failing as a company. Google will be around far longer than either of us.

I'm not sure what you mean about Reader though?

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