Comments on: The Perfect Way to Use Feedburner Without Giving Them Your Subscribers?

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 18:14:40 +0000

Currently feed readers are using Feedburner’s bandwidth, even using the plugin from ordered list

Using Marks code he is using curl to create a snapshot of the feed on Feedburner each time it is requested, and then that whole page is served from your server.

I don’t know how much additional load that would make on a server, plus currently there is the problem of the desktop readers, which might increase.

I think the biggest potential for this method would be if WordPress.com users wanted something like this to be included as an option on their feeds, because currently they have no way to redirect the autodiscovery feed.

By: Vlad

Vlad — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 18:01:44 +0000

Andy when I said about bandwidth, I thought it would be possible, after following Mark’s steps. To direct the origianl feed to let say a xml file that contains only one post and does not change. I am not sure if that would actually save bandwidth, but for example in my blog I have output of 20 recent posts. Sorry if I created confusion with my comment.

By: mark from 45n5.com

mark from 45n5.com — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 15:20:36 +0000

Andy and Your Readers,

I added a creative commons license to the code so feel free to modify it or come up with your own creations. Or a completely new take on it too.

The idea is there, just needs some refinement now.

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 15:17:01 +0000

Using this technique you would use more bandwidth.

I don’t fully understand the technical issues on the reporting, but then there might be a work around.

As an example I am not sure how the various desktop readers resolve the current feedburner redirect plugin.

Maybe there is a way to handle different requests in different ways, so you pass the destop clients through to the feedburner site. They are currently a small fraction of subscribers.

The other alternative is to in some way count the requests yourself, cache them for desktop readers, and report to feedburner yourself in the same way as the readers would.

By: Vlad

Vlad — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 14:16:34 +0000

So this plugin would be a win win situation for both feedburner and me. I still get my stattistics while using much less bandwith? Am I reading this corretly?

By: mark from 45n5.com

mark from 45n5.com — Wed, 28 Feb 2007 14:12:22 +0000

Thanks for the mention andy ;-) I’ll link back shortly ;-)

The CTO from feedburner stopped by and said the trick won’t provide accurate results.

I’m a bit confused on their reasoning, but the point is there is more debate to be had on this in the original thread, and the fact that the the CTO commented makes me think we are on to something

Thanks again.