Dave Winer on FeedBurner
I just saw Dave’s October 2004 post regarding Feedburner in a more recent Scripting News post.
When Dave wrote his initial piece I was just ramping up into blogging and RSS (much to the detriment of my “free-time”) and so ignored the post, not knowing what Feedburner was. After I became aware of Feedburner, I shared some of Dave’s emotions about Feedburner, having seen a few Feedburner feeds that included ads (the first few feeds I saw with ads, in fact).
FastForward to a few weeks ago. I want to move my Blogger account to a WordPress site and I’m not satisfied with my ISP’s stats package - misleading and hard to navigate. I don’t want to use one of those silly counters. I know enough Apache to redirect my feeds, but not enough php (or anything else appropriate) to be able to easily script my stats out into a me-parseable format.
What’s the solution? Feedburner, for me.
I get to choose whether to populate my feed with ads (I don’t). I get to pick what versions to offer (all that I can think of, Atom, RSS 1.x, RSS 2.0). And if Feedburner goes away I’ll know about it in a day at most because I sit on those feeds in my aggregator. I open up my blog’s root folder .htaccess file and remove the feed redirect lines (actually just delete the damn thing - ’cause that’s all that’s in there) and WordPress takes over seamlessly and (mostly) transparently to my 2.5 readers.
Until there’s a transparent way for WordPress (or MovableType) to give me what I need stats-wise, Feedburner works for me. Thanks Feedburner guys!