Rachel just pinged me on IM to let me know of post she’s just writtten which I really wish she’d written a year ago. It’s about a WP Plugin called WordPress FeedBurner Plugin which makes your Feedburner RSS feed (if you have one) the one that is autodiscovered by feedreaders like Bloglines when people want to subscribe to your blog.
So here at ProBlogger for example I’ve long had a Feedburner RSS feed (it’s the orange button with the number towards the top of my sidebar) but being the untechie guy that I am I had never changed my blog to make it the one that readers find when they use an RSS auto discovery tool. As a result readers were subscribing to my default ProBlogger RSS feed.
Now in lots of ways this doesn’t matter – both feeds get the information to readers which is the main thing. The only real negative is that it has meant my feedburner statistics that tell me how many subscribers there are and which posts they click through onto has been inaccurate.
Needless to say – I’ve just installed the plugin (a very easy set up) and any new subscribers that I get should be on the new feed.
Of course if you’re not using Feedburner this will be a bit of a useless post to you (and if you’re not using WP it might just frustrate you unless you find a plugin for your own platform).
Update: The cool thing about this plugin is that it converts any existing subscribers to my old feeds to the feedburner one. As a result my stats button has gone from around 1700 earlier in the day to over 3000 in just a few hours. No I have not just had an influx of new readers – it’s just starting to count them accurately for the first time ever.
What is the point? FeedBurner is already as easy as it gets. File under pointless.
FYI – Your RSS feed isn’t working. I don’t know if it’s related to the plug in, or if it’s a feedburner problem. Duncan’s also isn’t working, maybe he used the plug in too?
Just thought you’d like to know.
e, did you read my post too? Perhaps you misread what the plugin does.
The plugin’s not there to put a Feedburner button on your site, it’s funnelling *all* RSS traffic through Feedburner, rather than your blog’s native feeds. Instead of only seeing *partial* subscriber statistics when you log into your Feedburner account, you’re seeing *all* subscribers :)
Bob – I think Darren made a mistake with the setting change the plugin requires you to make in Feedburner.. I’m sure he’ll fix it shortly :-) It’s not a plugin error.
I’ve used this plugin for quite some time and love it! It truly is very simple(the hardest part was copying and pasting some code to an .htaccess file and uploading it to the server.)
If you’re using wordpress and feedburner, you need this plugin.
Brandon
Having just seen what it looks like over at bloglines compared to the previous feed – I’m very impressed.
Cool, a plugin that will make our life that little bit easier. I like things streamlined :)
OK i get it, but…
What is wrong with just putting this in the head? Doesnt it do the same thing?
All of your autodiscovery clients will be directed to feed burner, no?
e, yeah I considered that at first – it fixes the autodiscovery issue for sure. It doesn’t stop people typing in your feed’s URL directly into a browser, and it doesn’t stop people finding your feed via search engines either. The plugin redirects people who hit those pages over to feedburner :)
OK i get it, but…
What is wrong with just putting this in the head? Doesnt it do the same thing?
[replace “-” with “>” or “
OK i get it, but…
What is wrong with just putting this in the head? Doesnt it do the same thing?
[replace “-” with “that other sign i cannot write here”]
-link rel=”alternate” type=”application/atom+xml” title=”Atom” href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeedburner” /-
-link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS 1.0″ href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeedburner” /-
-link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rss+xml” title=”RSS 2.0″ href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeedburner” /-
-link rel=”EditURI” type=”application/rsd+xml” title=”RSD” href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeedburner” /-
All of your autodiscovery clients will be directed to feed burner, no?
Then you could hide it in a directory, then specify that location in FeedBurner where it is.
But i guess after all that the pugin may be easier… =)
i admit defeat…
feed should be all fixed now
Feed is working here now, Darren. If you won’t mind, could you comment on what happened to the feed? I am considering doing the feedburner thing, but am a little concerned with what happened to your feed.
Thanks!
Darren..
I’ve been using this for a while and was concerned with that issue. All this plugin does is prevent future subscriptions from not being counted. If you are running wp-shortstats plugin, look in the resources section – the …/wp-rss2.php file hit-counts should stop advancing. Then, it doesn’t matter how many options the auto-discovery of the RSS field options pop up on people’s readers (atom, feed, 2.0, .92, etc etc). It’s the same as if you were to just edit the header.php file and insert the actual feedburner code over the individual “link rel=” codes.
I can’t recall who, otherwise I would just link that entry, but it was someone in 9rules who wrote once about capturing the count pre-plugin .. by renaming the wp-rss2.php file in the root directory to wp-rss2-feed.php then creating wp-rss2.php to have code (hope this works in here)
Perhaps some designer familiar with php and wordpress can verify if this is still valid – I hope so, as I’m still using it for my PetLvr site. My feedcount numbers, however, only jumped from 8 to 18 at the time.
oh- it didn’t work (the code didn’t show) ..maybe 2’s the charm?
less-than question-mark
header(“HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently”);
header(“Location: /feed/”);
exit();
question-mark greater-than
I have been using the plugin myself, and I like it.
[…] Vía Pro Blogger, Darren nos cuenta de este nuevo plugin para WordPress para hacer que de servicios como bloglines utilicen el feed de FeedBurner cuando utilizan la herramienta de autodiscovery. […]
I tried the plugin, but coudln’t get it to work. When I configured everything and hit the link to test, I got a page cannot be found.
This might be because I am running WordPress on a Windows environment. If anyone has a fix, please post it.
e – I’ve been using it for ages. It gracefully redirects any subscribers to any of the old feeds to the feedburner version. Putting stuff in the header of the page would not do that, as they would still be subscribed to the other feed’s URI.
Thanks for the link Darren.
I was shocked to see how many subscribers I should have been tracking.
Bob – all I did wrong was not follow the instructions and add the feed they gave me at the end of the set up process to Feedburner. My fault completely for being in a rush.
Your new post are not showing up on my Bloglines anymore.
Bloglines is not recognizing your feed anymore.
I even unsubscribed, then re-subscribed, but it still doesn’t work.
[…] Een post van ProBlogger wees me zojuist op een hele aardige WordPress Feedburner plugin. De plugin bestaat al een flink aantal maanden, maar ik had het bestaan ervan tot nu toe niet opgemerkt, terwijl ik toch een flink aantal draadjes in de WordPress-forums heb doorgespit. […]
Darren your feed is working for me, no problems here
Hi,
I’ve submitted some tracbacks to ProBlogger in the first post on a blog that I just started. All of them seemed to be on topic (at least for me). But there’s some mixed results.
The first two trackbacks to the posts “How much do I earn blogging ” and “How not to launch a blog” went through without a glitch. For the last trackback, WordPress shows that ping to the post “Becoming a Pro Blogger” went through just fine. But I can not find it in your comments section.
Today I did another post on FeedBurner plugin and tried to ping this blog post.. But my WordPress installation doesn’t show that it pinged this blog post at all. And it doesn’t show up in comments. Other pings were OK. So here are some questions:
Is there something wrong with my WordPress configuration?
Did I get caught in some spam filter here, due to big amount of links in my post? Or,
Did I violate some posting policy rule and am banned from trackbacking to this blog?
Any other reasons for this weird bahaviour?
Can’t find any record of them being blocked at this end Staska. Perhaps it was caught in the spam catcher because you did them all too quickly but I can’t even see it caught there.
Sorry.
Oh well,
Will start looking what’s wrong on my end. Good opportunity to learn how trackbacks, pings and spam filters actually work :). I have all weekend for that. Will post results on my blog, if I find anything interesting.
Thank’s for quick reply,
Staska
[…] I also see wild fluctuations with other sites that use the Feedburner button (the one to the right of my profile picture). Most prominently, I’ve been noticing that Darren’s Feedburner stats have been fluctuating from the 1000s to 3000s and back down to the 2000s. Darren clued me in to a WordPress Plugin for Feedburner that helps to reflect more accurate stats for reader circulation, but now I wonder. Hmmm… […]
Yeah, that’s a really cool tool. Feedburner is awesome. When I moved my blog from blogger to Dreamhost, I noticed that my subscriber numbers were lower than before. I also noticed that Feedburner wasn’t counting my Bloglines subscribers. Feedburner was reporting something like 123 subscribers and my two bloglines accounts were around 230 subscribers. It took me a long time, but someone finally told me about the WordPress plugin. After I hooked it up, my Feedburner subscribers jumped to over 400 and have been growing ever since (I’m up to around 720 although the number changes frequently).
[…] WordPress Feedburner Plugin: ProBlogger Blog Tips Need to get this installed–a plugin that ensures would-be subscribers find your feedburner feed instead of another one. (tags: plugins wordpress rss feedburner toinstall) […]
Great job guys… Thank for you work…
Hey there Darren, this is my first comment on problogger …I’ve got a question…for the moment I only have 4 subscribers to my feed through feedburner….my question is, do you think that placing the feedburner button (that counts only 4 readers) in a higher place on my blog would be good. I mean I know it will make it easier for people to subscribe, but the fact that I only have 4 readers, won’t that make a bed reputation for my blog and chase people away? What do you think? Thanks
it’s an interesting question Vlad.
I’ll tackle it in two parts:
1. I think placing an RSS button high on your page makes sense. More people will see it and hopefully subscribe.
2. With regards to using the counter button – On some of my blogs with lower reader numbers I don’t use the counter rss button because I guess I’m not wanting to advertise the fact that the sites are not yet popular. There’s nothing to be ashamed of with a low reader count – but I guess it might put some people off a little. It’s personal choice really on that front.
That’s what I love about WordPress.. you can configure everything and often you don’t even need to mess around with the code.
I installed it and it works just fine.
Darren,
Just saw your post about FeedBurner (searching info about it) and I guess maybe its better to switch soon rather than later. Thanks for sharing this info.
Thanks for sharing this! I just started blogging and just recently found your blog, and it’s full of so many great tips!
You are definitely not the only “un-techie” type out there. Thanks for this plug-in and all the info that goes along with it.