by Now that WordPress.com no longer offers RSS feeds stats analysis, you can try to work around that deficit as a Blog owner by signing up for the just-purchased-by-Google FeedBurner Service. All the keen “Pro” FeedBurner features are now FREE! RSS feed stats can be valuable in telling you who is reading your blog and through what method. FeedBurner allows you to “re-burn” your default RSS feed.
On my Boles University Blogger blog, you can tell your Blogger to use the FeedBurner RSS feed instead of the default feed. That’s a great way to unify RSS feeds under a single master. I cover in-depth how to use FeedBurner with Blogger and Google Apps in my new book, the Google Apps Administrator Guide due soon from Thomson Publishing and CoursePTR.
You can create a wide variety of customizable, neat, FeedBurner headline widgets as I have done for Boles University.
You can also create a link for readers to get email updates about your blog content and here’s how to get Boles University blog updates.
Using a FeedBurner re-burned RSS feed here on your favorite Urban Semiotic is a little more clunky because you can’t replace the default WordPress.com RSS feed with a FeedBurner feed. Yet.
That means you are splitting your RSS readership between regular RSS readers and superb FeedBurner burned readers. Most people will just use your default feed. Other readers who are, perhaps, more tech savvy and FeedBurner-sensitive, will pull your FeedBurner RSS feed if you offer it up.
I created a FeedBurner RSS headline widget for Urban Semiotic and placed a smaller version of the following in our sidebar:
Here’s the link to use if you want to get email updates from Urban Semiotic via FeedBurner.
There are pre-programmed defaults for adding headlines and other neat feed features for WordPress.com blogs on FeedBurner. The greater value in currently using these headline widgets is beyond your WordPress.com blog proper — on, say, on your website or on another blog
— so you can force the FeedBurner RSS feed you prefer instead of the default you don’t.
Hi David,
I’ve always liked Feedburner. Now that it is a Google property, I’m going to have to go check it out to see all of the new features.
Google plans to take over the world! Pretty soon almost everything we need online will be supplied in some fashion by Google.
I liked FeedBurner too a lot way back when. Then they started to charge for features that I always felt should’ve been free.
Now that they’ve seen the light in the Google charge, I think they will be quite a fantastic channel for blog publication notifications. The seamless interaction between Blogger and FeedBurner is really slick!
why won’t wordpress allow feedburner?
I don’t know, arin, especially since WordPress.com does not provide their own proprietary feed stats any longer.
maybe they don’t want to help blogger and google
That might be so, arin, but WordPress.com does use Google AdSense on hosted blogs so there is an established relationship there.
it has to be coming if they’re so far in
Gosh, I hope so! That would be a great way to re-burn an RSS feed, though WP.com might not like giving up those stats to Google. Just because we don’t have access to those stats doesn’t mean WP.com doesn’t! 😀
i just got the new feed from here in google reader looks the same hope it help
Cool! That helps a lot, arin, thanks!
like those banners a lot
Thanks, arin! I like those banners, too. They have all sorts of styles you can use.