Leading feed-pimping website FeedBurner is now offering its PRO services completely free. There is no catch. And people who have been signed up for PRO accounts will not be billed for June 2007 onwards.
What do you get with a FeedBurner PRO account? Two things.
Stats PRO
First is Stats PRO, with which you’ll determine:
- Reach: how many view and click your what’s in your blog feed
- Aggregate Item Use: how all your feed items are used
- Single Item Use: how each of your feed items are used over time
You can activate these PRO features by choosing the Analyze tab of your selected feed, then clicking on FeedBurner Stats (PRO) under Services. Remember that you can gather statistics if (a) feed flare units are installed; or (b) you’ve installed the HTML code (which you can find at the bottom of said page) on your blog.
MyBrand
Next up is MyBrand. This service lets you use your own URL rather than FeedBurner’s own. (You need to have your own URL and control your DNS settings.) Before, people would resort to forcibly redirecting default blog feeds to their FeedBurner counterparts just so they can monitor usage and keep all feed subscribers in one place.
I personally dislike automatically redirecting feeds to FeedBurner because some blogs have sub-feeds which I might be interested in subscribing to, such as comment feeds, author feeds, and even date-specific feeds. For example, if I write at a group blog, maybe I’d want to pull only the feeds I’ve written on my own website. WordPress blogs can do that by default, but you won’t have access to them if you forward everything to FeedBurner.
I could discuss this in more detail, but MyBrand practically eliminates my need to complain!
With some DNS tinkering (some advanced knowledge is required, or you can ask help from your web host), you can set your blog feed URL something like feed.yourdomain.com/myfeed rather than feeds.feedburner.com/myfeed. You’ll get detailed instructions from FeedBurner after you sign up for the MyBrand service—just visit My Account and click on MyBrand.
Now the next question would have to be: how about my existing subscribers at the ugly FeedBurner URL? From then on you’ll have two URLs for the same feed. Since it’s just the same feed, no redirects are needed, but it’s probably wise to tweak existing ones (e.g., if you’re using FeedSmith, etc.).
If you haven’t tried out FeedBurner yet, now is the best time to do so!
Originally posted on July 5, 2007 @ 5:52 pm
