AngryPets Blog

Using FeedBurner with .Text .95

So, Feedburner is just plain cool. It proxies your RSS, and in return, you get a bunch of killer stats on who is accessing your feed, when, and how. Check out a screeen cap of their pro services (the free stuff has an equal wow-factor, just not as many features (of course)).

Nice huh? As in: who wouldn't want that?

Setting it up for .Text is pretty easy. There's just a tiny bit of juggling to make sure that you don't throw your feed into a bit of a loop... (think of it in terms of Indiana Jones in the begining of the first movie... trying to balance the amount of sand in that bag he used to try and switch out the gold/silver head/idol -- only if you mess up there are no tarantulas (or big rolling rocks, etc.))

Here's how:
1) Set up a FeedBurner Account. Get a free account (or pony-up for a premium account with extra bells and whistles) here. Use the url you get when you click on the xml/syndicate link from your blog (i.e. /yourblog/rss.aspx).

2) Repoint FeedBurner to where your feed WILL be. Once you've created a feed, you'll want to lie to FeedBurner for a minute or two. (Don't worry, it's not dumb enough to fall for it.) Jump back into your Feedburner account and change the url it uses to grab your feed from rss.aspx to rss2.aspx -- which you'll configure next.

3) Tweak .Text. Tweak your .Text's blog.config file:

• Find the pattern used to detect requests for your RSS (it's a regex looking for rss.aspx) like so:

  <HttpHandler Pattern = "(?:\/rss.aspx)$" Type = "Dottext... (snipped)" />
  

  and replace it with (just plunk a 2 in there after the rss):

  <HttpHandler Pattern = "(?:\/rss2.aspx)$" Type = "Dottext... (snipped)" />
  

  Now any requests to rss2.aspx will get access to your RSS feed. This is where you'll tell FeedBurner to come and grab your .Text RSS.
• Of course, you then have to worry about what visitors to your site get when they click on the XML button, or when their aggregator comes to your site looking for rss.aspx. What you want them to get is redirected to the RSS that is proxied at feedburner.com so that FeedBurner can grab/aggregate stats about requests for your feed. To do this you just need to modify another .Text pattern in the blog.config, to get it to treat requests for rss.aspx as 'normal' .aspx page requests. Find the pattern looking for admin,logout.aspx, and login.aspx

  <HttpHandler 
     Pattern = "(?:\/(?:admin|logout\.aspx|login\.aspx))" (snipped) />
  

  And change it to the following (just add-in another OR regex of rss\.aspx)

  <HttpHandler 
     Pattern = "(?:\/(?:admin|logout\.aspx|login\.aspx|rss\.aspx))" 
      (snipped) />
  

  Voila! Requests against .Text for rss.aspx will now be handled by ASP.NET in normal fashion.
• Drop a new rss.aspx file in the root of your blog with nothing more than a redirect to your feedburner feed:

  <% Response.Redirect(http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeedname/); %>
  

Give your site just a second or two, test it by hand, etc. Then resync your feed within Feedburner (there's an option to do this when you Edit your feed). Then sit back and watch your stats.

(Looks like I've got two subscribers - which would be me, and my mom. She says she reads my blog everyday -- but I can see she's only been doing it weekly. Guess I'll just have to up her pay... )

Existing Comments:

# re: Using FeedBurner with .Text .95 - Posted: 8/4/2005 5:48 AM - By: Jamie Thingelstad
   You have more than two subscribers to your RSS feed. :-)

Just say NO to FeedBurner, really. If you don't like my opinion, how about Dave Winers?

http://archive.scripting.com/2004/10/26#When:9:19:02AM

FeedBurner takes a really big thing, it disintermediates you from your subscribers, and provides you with a really small thing, some stats. Realistically, everything on that stats page can be gleaned from a basic log analyser with the right filters in place.

Meanwhile you've given FeedBurner this great way to monetize your content, on your behalf, for some shiny trinkets.

# re: Using FeedBurner with .Text .95 - Posted: 8/4/2005 5:49 AM - By: Jamie Thingelstad
   Also, I expect this work you were doing is why for the last couple of days your RSS feed has been very "whacky". Several times Thunderbird felt it needed to post all your items as new, over and over. Simply deleting the items was fine, but I was curious if something was wrong as I'd never had that behavior from a .Text driven RSS service before.

# re: Using FeedBurner with .Text .95 - Posted: 8/4/2005 10:04 AM - By: Michael K. Campbell
   Jamie,

Interesting observations about FeedBurner. I'm not going with any of the monetized versions... If I ever add ads to my blog, it will only be on my site, etc.

I'm not too worried either about Feedburner going belly-up or giving me an ultimatum -- I can quickly pull out. Everyone that gets my feed currently gets it from my site (where I do a quick redirect to feedburner). If Feedburner ever caused me problems, I could just stop that redirect and be back up and running.

Also, I just barely switched to feedburner - like 40 minutes before I made this post (I did a bunch of testing on my local machine, etc.). My hunch is that Thunderbird is actually the culprit here. I use bloglines as an online aggregator -- and subscribe to my own feed to keep tabs on it. I haven't noticed anything goofy (such as resets) etc.

Thanks for the heads-up though. I appreciate it. (That, and if you are commenting here, it means I have more than just my mom reading... woot!)

# re: Using FeedBurner with .Text .95 - Posted: 8/4/2005 10:27 AM - By: Brian
   I had the same experience as Jamie -- I was about to slap RSS Bandit as I was getting duplicate posts.

If feedburner inserts ads into the feed, then that's reason enough to avoid using it. Although, it wasn't clear if that's the case -- perhaps only once a feed hits a certain volume will that happen. Indeed, it seems most of the concern is over what *might* happen once the business model is matured, potentially leaving subscribers in the lurch. Hmmmm...

# re: Using FeedBurner with .Text .95 - Posted: 8/4/2005 10:36 AM - By: Michael K. Campbell
   Mom? Is that you? Quit screwing with me. Or (to borrow a line from Homer), I'll end up putting you in one of those crooked homes I saw on 60 minutes.

(Oh, and Feedburner gives you the OPTION to put ads into your feed. They won't force you to. )

# re: Using FeedBurner with .Text .95 - Posted: 8/4/2005 11:21 AM - By: Brian
   Hehe... I guess you're up to three subscribers. That's 3 more than me.

That said -- yeah, if the ads are an option (more of a value-add) and if you're redirecting, I don't see a problem at the present time -- a lot of the concern seems to be over a loss of control, but I'm not seeing it.

For whatever it's worth, I think it was about 2 days ago that I suddenly started getting all duplicates (no comments, either, IIRC). Then today, coinciding with your post, it all started working again... not sure if that helps...

# re: Using FeedBurner with .Text .95 - Posted: 8/4/2005 12:19 PM - By: Carson McComas
   Good grief I can't take it anymore. Feedburner is burnin' down the house of logic and Occam's razor.

1) The "ads" you can put in your feedburner feeds are YOUR ads. Your AdSense ads. Feedburner gets ziltch from those, all revenue goes to you.

2) Feedburner isn't going to start throwing it's own ads in your feed. They aren't suicidal, plus they DO already have a revenue model with the pro account. And if they were suicidal... why would they institute policies like this one[1] where they essentially eliminate all the pain of leaving them. Chill the paranoia my homies. (And Dave Winer is just being Dave Winer. On this issue he's either completely misinformed, stupid, or the post is just old. Probably the latter (post is dated Oct/04), but it still doesn't make him right. Plus it shows how his prescient paranoia was unfounded.)

[1] http://www.burningdoor.com/feedburner/archives/001251.html

# re: Using FeedBurner with .Text .95 - Posted: 8/10/2005 3:43 PM - By: Michael K. Campbell
   Well, about a week later and all is still going well.

I saw that my feed reset itself one day. I really don't know what that was... maybe just Satan.

So far I'm way happy with the results. Who would have thought that I've got about 50+ people solidly subscribed to my blog? (Unless that's just my mom trying to screw with my head -- i.e. build me up so that she can tear me down some day with the 'truth'... )

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