RSS gets Classy

I just finished an orgy of tweaking my websites. You may not have noticed, but believe me when I say that I have been one busy Bloke. I was up to 5 am because I was so excited playing with a new toy that I found (please don’t tell my wife).

The biggest change to the site(s) are I have added additional news search buttons and links at News Blog. And I’ve reduced my RSS news feed offerings down to one.

I changed to Feedburner as my RSS publisher of choice. I used to provide both an Atom version (that comes with Blogger) as well as a converted Atom (RSS 2) version. Now I only have one converted RSS by Feedburner.

So what’s the big deal Bloke? Well I’ll tell you. Feedburner is an incredible product that I blundered upon and I highly recommend it. What will it do for you? Well, for starters it will convert Atom (or any other XML) to the RSS flavour of your choice. Nothing new here - right?

Ah, but there’s still more to come. More importantly, it tracks stats of your news feeds. So what does that mean Bloke? It means you can track users that have subscribed to your feeds. Yes, you read that correctly. Cool eh?

So what are the other benefits? Too many to mention here, but for starters it provides a user-friendly page with directions telling your readers how to subscribe to your feed. You can personalize it with pictures of yourself, your dog, or whatever by using a photo service called Flickr. Sweet.

There are numerous other options including a link splicer for the layout of your feed, and more. So why not check it out for yourself? It’s FREE!

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Just one caveat. The feed seems a little slow showing up in the news aggregator (I use Bloglines). I’ve contacted Feedburner and waiting for a response. Will keep you posted.