Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Have your feed and burn it too

The justly popular Feedburner service comes with a 500-kb limit. Exceed that and Feedburner will not syndicate all your content, dropping the oldest first.

This is consistent with the model of a feed as a broadcast of your posts to subscribers (via feed reader or email). Such readers presumably are only interested in your latest and greatest.

However, complete feeds that comprise all of your content are broadly useful for other purposes, such as my Blog Journey hack to show posts in chronological order, oldest first.

There is no need to discontinue your highly useful Feedburner feed. You can keep it, and your old, unshortened feed, if you refrain from redirecting your blog feed to the one you burn at Feedburner.

Sure, Blogger and Feedburner advise you to redirect, by specifying your Feedburner feed at Settings > Other > Site Feed > Post Feed Redirect URL. That way anyone who accesses any of your old site feeds will automatically get the feed you control (and can customize) at Feedburner.

However, you also lose your complete feed if you do. So if you need a full feed but want a Feedburner feed too (for instance, to put Feedburner's automated subscribe-by-email gadget in your sidebar), just leave the redirect field blank.

If you've previously redirected to Feedburner, reset by clearing the field and saving.

Do that, and you can use Feedburner and your old feed--all of it.

3 comments:

  1. An excellent point Adam - which could be even more important if dynamic views work the way that I suspect they're eventually going to work.

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  2. Thank you, Mary!

    As you can see from this comment (and reply) and also this comment (and reply), it was really my readers that brought this issue into sharp focus.

    Thanks to them!

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  3. Thank you. I had created a feedburner feed and redirected my blog's (MS-potilas) feed there, like "they" told me to. But I was all the time wondering if it is the best solution. Now I removed the redirection and put a link to my feedburner feed below the rss subscribtion gadget, so people can choose it and/or subscribe by email. Makes much more sense to me this way.

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