Why Feedburner Rocks.

I recently received a comment to a post:

I have a question about Feedburner. I keep hearing about it, but I don't really understand what it does, exactly. Is it like Bloglines? Can you enlighten me? Thanks!

Since there's nobody subscribed to the comment feed, (hint, hint) I thought I'd respond as a new post.

Here goes:

Feedburner isn't an aggregator, or feed reader like Bloglines, but a collection of tools to enhance your RSS feed.

I like Feedburner for a few reasons.

#1 Stats, stats and more stats. (bigger pictures)
How are people subscribing? Sure, Bloglines will tell you how many people subscribed in Bloglines to your feed, but what about all the other aggregators? (Bloglines users account for a smaller percentage of my readers)

Which posts are getting the most click-throughs?

Feedburner shows I have 48 subscribers now, but this shows 26 as "live circulation" since this number is based on when the aggregators look for new content. The number fluctuates based depending on how people have their aggregators set. Interesting to see the large jumps in subscribers after posting about the CODI conference, and the Gaming in Libraries Symposium.

#2 Feedburner makes it super easy for people to subscribe with their favorite aggregator without readers (or me) having to distinguish between atom feeds, rss versions and all that. If you are reading via an aggregator (or feedblitz), you can click here to see the options available when visitors to the blog web page click on the subscribe link.

#3 Super easy to try podcasting. Feedburner can configure your feed to handle enclosures, and also has the fields you can fill in to add the info you'll need for iTunes. It will also submit your podcast feed to Yahoo podcasts (if you want). It also gives readers info about subscribing to podcasts when they click on your feed.

#4 all the other features!
Add creative commons info, add links so readers can add one of your posts to their del.icio.us account, or email it. Tools to convert your feed to HTML (imbed your library news feed right into the website?) And lots lots more.

#5 It's free!

#6 It's easy to use & set up the features you want to use. Very customizable.

#7 They're based in Chicago!


Thanks to Jenny for telling me about Feedburner when I asked her in my early blogging days (LOL) how people gather stats, since I knew we would want to know if our library's blogs were being read!

Thanks to "veggienerd" for asking the question!

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• feedburner