1. It came up today on one of my client's calls; some one wondered if it violated a company to use FeedBurner to monitor RSS Feeds since FeedBurner hosts your RSS Feeds. I assured this person you could keep your actual RSS feed url and still use FeedBurner.

Posted at 12:06AM on May 23rd 2006 by webmetricsguru

2. Or setup a .htaccess to temporary redirect a feed url on your own domain to point to your feedburner url.

Then, if you ever wish to switch feedproviders you can change it in your .htaccess file, and no-one will ever know.

The load on serving a redirect is very small, and in IMHO is worth the flexibility and redundancy it affords you.

Posted at 6:28AM on May 23rd 2006 by Ben Metcalfe

3. Thanks, Ben, for pointing this out. It is usually the combination of both that work best:

1. Use our MyBrand service to map your own domain to our hosted domain

2. use .htaccess or httpd.conf to do a 302 redirect

that way, you can just 1) change DNS and 2) change .htaccess if you ever want to leave.

we have tons of detailed instructions for how to do this if anyone is interested.

- Steve

Posted at 9:20AM on May 23rd 2006 by Steve Olechowski

4. "If we had to, I'll bet someone could write a script that could look over your OPML file, visit the HTML URLs and replace the Feedburner URLs in your file with the standard RSS URLs for WordPress, Blogger, MT, LiveJournal or whatever type of blog each one was."

Just to play Devil's Advocate here: Who's we? One of the goals of RSS is to go mainstream and scalable. Whose script, run where, and by whom? This is a pretty big potential outage we're talking about here, and one saving grace might be that less technical users will be on something like Bloglines - who hopefully could implement something like this.

But, I'm willing to bet, for most people the dead FeedBurner subscriptions would just go pfft. I mean one of the main reasons for using an aggregator is so that you don't have to personally pay attention to the subscriptions. So, it'd be awhile before it occurs to you - "Hey, I haven't heard from Joe's Tech Journal in ages... I wonder what happened?" Granted, if you're any sort of nerd, you'll likely have heard the cries of a thousand blog feeds extinguished, but you know...

The thing at the end of the day, though, is that RSS is meant to be decentrallized. It's intended to be far flung and divorced from concentrated nodes of control. Anything which pulls RSS away from this principle is necessarily damaging, even if only as little.

Posted at 11:54AM on May 23rd 2006 by l.m.orchard

5. I don't know what Dave is complaining about. I use Feedburner. They don't own my domain. They don't own anyone's domain that uses the MyBrand service they offer, http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/publishers/mybrand. At $3 per month, I find it cheap insurance that anyone can afford. People should definitely be masters of their own domains. That's why I remain amazed anyone is using WordPress, in the way Dave does here on his Scripting News Annex, http://scripting.wordpress.com/. WordPress controls that domain -- not him. If they do evil or disappear tomorrow, he's out of luck. No one should build anything off of anyone else's domain. Those that do frankly have only themselves to blame.

Posted at 1:05PM on May 23rd 2006 by Danny Sullivan

6. Feedburner has done a great job of providing up-to-date services that are useful to publishers.

Nevertheless, there's no question that Feedburner has the potential to be a single point of failure, and that the way they present RSS feeds as a web page can steal page views from sites.

For serious users, Steve and Ben's suggestion of using a redirect should provide the best of both worlds. I wonder, though, if the people that know enough to be editing .htaccess files might be better served doing their own stats.

Your feed example raises another topic. The feed has a generator value that tells the world that you're using an old version of WordPress. Having this sort of information in feeds seems like a potential security liability.

Recently, PHPBB, a forum application, was widely hacked because it puts its name and version number in the footer of forum pages. This meant that when a security vulnerability was found, it was trivial to create scripts that searched Google for vulnerable sites.

Do you think that setting a generator value could be just as risky?

Posted at 1:07PM on May 23rd 2006 by Video Podcasting News

7. Danny, I have backup copies of everything on my WordPress site, and most of it is just a mirror of what's on www.scripting.com.

I wasn't "complaining."

I was suggesting that putting so many feeds on one domain might not be a very good thing.

And I host my RSS feed on my own domain as well.

Posted at 1:53PM on May 23rd 2006 by Dave Winer

8. It seems that this is in some ways a larger discussion about the use of third party online services in general. Some clear criteria to determine exportability, stability and data ownership could be useful in determining the desirability of any service like this. Dave's original post listed some ideas along these lines. In this particular situation I think that the groundwork is there to make widespread use of Feedburner acceptable. It's probably a much safer situation than, for example, the practice of linking so many blog tags to Technorati.

Winer's post linked above is far more reasonable in my mind than, for example, this one by Todd Cochrane. http://www.geeknewscentral.com/archives/006095.html It was the combination of Cochrane's, Winer's and all the hullabaloo about FeedPass this weekend that put me in the emotional space I was in when I wrote the post above.

It seems there is plenty of cause for concern when one vendor is used so heavily, but I think that in this case the benefits outweigh the risks that have been mitigated by fair technical steps.

Posted at 2:04PM on May 23rd 2006 by Marshall Kirkpatrick

9. Dave, sorry on the "complaining" part. Perhaps concern would have been the better word to use. And it's a valid concern for anyone to have. You must have control over your own domain.

Backups of what you have on the WordPress site mean little. You don't control the links to content on that site. If you have a great post over there -- on that site -- that everyone is linking to, you have no way to automatically point to the new location if you leave WordPress and they don't want to cooperate.

I wish deeply that WordPress would offer something similar to MyBrand from FeedBurner. It's pretty easy to do. And if putting all the feeds on one domain is risky, putting all these blogs on one subdomain is risky as well.

So coming back to feeds. FeedBurner does the DNS for my feeds using the feeds.searchenginewatch.com domain we use at SEW (or feeds.daggle.com on my personal blog). If they went down, you just switch the resolution to point back to your own site or somewhere else. Bang, you're back up within a few hours to a day at most.

Overall, FeedBurner is pretty much offering exactly what you suggest that a competitor should offer, and they deserve major kudos for having this option for a very cheap price.

The problem is that relatively few people know about the program. It's not hidden. Instead, to me, the bigger issue is that relatively few people even think about the need to own control over their domains (from mail to web to blog to feeds) in the first place. If you aren't concerned, you don't then think to ask. If you think to ask, well, FeedBurner's got the option.

Posted at 2:39PM on May 23rd 2006 by Danny Sullivan

10. In this day and age the type of simple statistics and minimal information that the feedburner folks provide should easily be able to be run from ones own website. The first company that comes out with a good product I will pay them for that product.

But I have been a long term advocater of controlling ones feeds, sure you can pay them $3.00 a month but I think if they opened up there books you would find about 99% of the feeds they host do not use that service. Additionally and this is speculation on my part I bet another 95% do not use a re-direct.

Obviously there service boils down to a choice. But sadly there service plays on people that do not understand technology and the ramifications of using there service. Big companies are aware and put in the safeguards that are recommended so it is mute point.

Having tried there advanced services on a site that we were using their services for was highly disappointing and I wrote about my thoughts on that some time ago,

It is obvious that the demand is not significant for a stand-alone application for those hosting their own sites as no one has created the application yet, in the meantime Feedburner will continue to serve those that want to use it and those of us that are looking for a solution that we can deploy on our own sites under our own domains will keep looking.

Posted at 4:00PM on May 23rd 2006 by todd cochrane

11. Danny, FeedBurner added the option after I wrote about their lock-in last time, so I wouldn't give them too many points -- they weren't proactive. In any case, as Todd says, most people don't use it and don't know about it, and there will trouble when they cash in on the lock-in. I don't believe in company's benevolence, I've been on a few boards, and I understand how they work, they have to work that way to represent the interests of shareholders. Ultimately the users will have to look out for theirs. Me, I care about RSS, having put so much effort into making it work, I don't want to see it cashed in by a company, the way FeedBurner is.

Your content may be fine Danny, but most people's are not. Your points about Wordpress.com are good ones. I'm not depending on it myself, at least not very much, but I am aware of that dependence. I want to make sure that to the extent I can, that FeedBurner users are aware of their dependence. I also want to try to influence their competitors to offer a better service to the users. I don't doubt that they're all listening now, and I won't take the pressure off, because I want RSS to thrive, not to be locked up in Brad Feld's portfolio.

Posted at 4:47PM on May 23rd 2006 by Dave Winer

12. "If we had to, I'll bet someone could write a script that could look over your OPML file, visit the HTML URLs and replace the Feedburner URLs in your file with the standard RSS URLs for WordPress, Blogger, MT, LiveJournal or whatever type of blog each one was."

You're right Marshall. Someone could.

Posted at 11:28PM on May 23rd 2006 by Aaron

13. > I think if they opened up there books you would find about 99% of the feeds they host do not use that service.

And I'm sure if I go to Blogger or Six Apart or WordPress, I'd find the vast majority of users there don't use their own domains even though with the first two, there is that option, to my understanding. The blame resides on content owners not understanding the need to start off correctly and go with their own domains, rather than the hosting providers.

> In the meantime Feedburner will continue to serve those that want to use it and those of us that are looking for a solution that we can deploy on our own sites under our own domains will keep looking.

With respect, Todd, then you simply don't understand how the MyBrand service works. I put out feeds under my own domain. No redirects are required. Since it's my own domain, I completely control it. It is the solution you are looking for. Honestly, you should try it, if this is something you are seeking.

> Danny, FeedBurner added the option after I wrote about their lock-in last time, so I wouldn't give them too many points -- they weren't proactive.

Dave, it looks like you wrote about this issue as best I can tell back in June 2005, here I'm guessing:
http://www.scripting.com/2005/06/09.html#When:12:55:44PM

That's the same month they started the precursor to the MyBrand service, http://blogs.feedburner.com/feedburner/archives/001270.html.

Looks like they did it pretty much right after you raised it, same month. That's responsive, in my book. That's a heck of a lot more responsive than WordPress. Robert's asked them publicly a couple of times now about letting people have their own domains -- that still hasn't happened. Would have been great if FeedBurner offered it before you asked, definitely. But to roll it out so quickly when raised -- I still give them kudos for that. Of course, if you raised it even early and found there was some kicking and streaming, then I understand that concern.

Basically, I'm on the same page as you and Todd. People should avoid lock-in and be masters of their own domains. But my experience with FeedBurner's been extremely positive, and I see them providing anyone who cares to avoid lock-in an easy solution to get out. If anything, rather than FeedBurner being dinged, people ought to be highlighting the options they offer to have the best of both worlds. And as for pressuring competitors to offer similar services and features -- hey, I'm for that. Keeps everyone honest.

Posted at 4:14AM on May 24th 2006 by Danny Sullivan

14. Here's another Feedburner blog post from June 2005 explaining the steps they take to return your readers to your feed URL if and when you leave the Feedburner fold: http://blogs.feedburner.com/feedburner/archives/001251.html

That looks pretty good to me, but maybe I'm being naive.

Posted at 10:23AM on May 24th 2006 by Marshall Kirkpatrick