A website and blog by Peter Lewis
PostsWhy are feeds "burnt"?
Having just read Pete's Ashton's post on Feedburner, I have just finished converting this site over to use Feedburner to generate its RSS feed, rather than using the built-in Drupal one.
The main reason for this, it has to be said, is so that I can have a look at lots of juicy stats about how many people subscribe to my feed, where they are, and how they read my posts. I've been going on a bit of a stat frenzy lately, with the addition of the little map thingy on the bottom of the left panel of the main page, pin-pointing out my readers' locations. It's all just fun really, and this is a totally pointless post, other than to say that thanks to Dave Reid's module and a bit of php hacking myself, if you subscribe to my site's feed, you should notice no difference at all. If you do have any problems, then please drop a comment to this post and let me know the problem!
Why are feeds "burnt" anyway?
Was wondering why your previous posts had just reappeared in my reader. Didn't realise that you could swap over without changing feed URL but, thinking about it, there's no reason why you should need to.
Aw come on, I don't have time to do it for my site, too. (I have avoided feedburner but I get reminded too often that I should try it) Oh well...
But before I waste time I don't have, let's hear the fresh expert on two questions (if he does have time on his hands):
Thanks
1. That's exactly right, yes. It would. The way to do it is to use some HTTP redirects, as you say. So, you redirect the feed's address to point to feedburner, but make it conditional on the user agent of the person reading the feed. If the user is identified as feedburner itself, then give it the original feed, otherwise perform the redirect. There are some tutorials around on the web of how to do this using .htaccess files and things, but also pre-made modules for Drupal, Wordpress et al. I've used a bit of a combination of both on here to get what I want.
2. You're welcome to burn my feed, yes, but it won't provide you with any statistics about anything other than how often you've read it. I only get the statistics because other people read it through my feedburner account now (hence why the redirect is necessary).
Good luck in implementing it for your little CMS!
Why are feeds "burnt"? Branding schmanding. It's also a better name than "clever RSS service" and the free software fanatics have used all the best recursive acronyms (e.g. LAME)
From their website:
`Hurd' stands for `Hird of Unix-Replacing Daemons'. And, then, `Hird' stands for `Hurd of Interfaces Representing Depth'. We have here, to my knowledge, the first software to be named by a pair of mutually recursive acronyms.
Impressive! If they've put even half as much effort into the software as coming up with the name(s), HURD will kick ass!
Well, unfortunately (and at the risk of upsetting quite a few people) HURD has not really become what it was supposed to be. It was the kernel designed for the GNU system, but then Linux came along and stole its thunder. The two systems are very different and represent two different technical approaches, hotly disputed by academics and geeks alike. Quite interesting, really... take a look at this wikipedia page.
I am just coming home from the "Distributed Systems" Lecture by Van Steen who wrote the book (with the same title) together with Tanenbaum (he is an emeritus here in Amsterdam).
Cool!
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