Scrivs has just posted a review of the RSS Feed Management tool Feedburner.
I’ve used it on two of my blogs for a few months now and have not really had any big problems with it. I love the stats feature which shows how many of your are accessing this site via RSS and am interested in how they seek to give those with feeds an income stream using Amazon (and for some Overture).
In terms of the Amazon ads that appear in my RSS feed – a number of you have asked how it performs – I can honestly say I have no idea. The weakness of this system is that there is no way of determining where Amazon sales come from or how many people even click on these ads. I’ve not noticed any real increase in Amazon sales since making the move.
Some people on Scriv’s post comment that they have timing out issues with Feedburner – I’m interested to hear if that is an issue with any of my readers. Feel free to add your experience of Feedburner below – either as a publisher or a feed reader.
Funny you should mention FeedBurner timing out right now Darren. I just happened to stop the site now, to find none of your posts after the “new Gizmodo editor” one (Tues afternoon – just shy of 48 hours ago) have shown up in my Bloglines subscription to your feedburner feed of ProBlogger… Thought I’d let you know THAT just in case its not something to do with my end, or Bloglines.
To figure how the Amazon stuff is doing, you have to create (ask Amazon for) additional tags. That way, you can look in your affiliate reports and see that probloggernet-21 (just a guess at what your id might be) had X visits and resulted in Y purchases. I’m assuming your main id is probloggernet-20.
Now that this is mentioned, I sometimes go days without seeing anything arrive in my NewsGator in Outlook for the ProBlogger feed. The first time I noticed this, I thought I should check your site, and there were like 16 new posts that I never received!
So I’ve been keeping an eye out on your feed and site to make sure it’s working fine… but the problem always comes back. And your feed is the only feedburner feed that does that in my NewsGator. To receive them, I usually have to re-subscribe.
I should try with another reader to better test this and let you know how it goes.
leonivek – is that a feedburner issue or a newsgator one? I really like the info that feedburner gives me -but the problem you mention I have noticed on several feeds when using newsgator. these no showing feeds are not all feedburner ones though.
As I said, I will test this using another reader. It could be NewsGator, I don’t know, yet.
Hi Darren, You can always tell if your FeedBurner feed is in synch and up to date just by clicking on the xml button on your site. We see your feed as having been in synch and up to date with no interruptions in our logs, and I thus suspect it was a reader that may have fallen out of synch on polling. Nonetheless, YOU should not have to guess at this stuff! One of the items on our to do list is to notify you via your personal FeedBurner feed when we see polling discrepancies or when your source feed is invalid (thus preventing us from making some transformations), etc. That way, we can be much more proactive about helping you stay up to speed on how your feed is “performing”. Always feel free to shoot us a feedback note if you have any questions. Oh, and coming in two weeks or less will be stats on how any commerce in your feed is performing. this stats table will be embedded in your feed’s daily stats page.
Thanks so much for the information. I am not sure on which feed reader is the best. I am brand spankin new to the world of blogging, but want to make a go of it. If you would, please give me a detailed explanation of what I need to do to get the best bang out of my blog?
Thanks so much.
Craig