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.
