The Danger of Giving up Control of your Feed

• Posted by B Jones on November 6th, 2007 - Comment on this Post »

… And How to Take Back Your Feeds

It seems as if my Feedburner feed has stopped working sometime this morning. I have been trying to get things worked out since around 9am today with no luck. The Feedburner contact page pretty much directs all queries to their forums.

I found several posts with the same problem, but none of them offered any solution that worked.

I posted my problem, but unfortunately, no one was there to help.

As a last resort, I called the phone number on the contact page (even though it says they don’t offer support via phone). The number was a direct line to Google. A nice lady answered, and gave me an email address to try: feedback@feedburner.com

So I’m still waiting, and my feed is still broken.

This situation does, however, raise some important questions and concerns about giving up control of your RSS to a 3rd party. I was hesitant in the first place to switch over to Feedburner, and now, I’m pretty much more concerned than ever.

I did a little bit of searching, and it turns out that I do have some good options.

Option 1: Use Your Own Feed AND Get FeedBurner Stats
It turns out that you can actually get the benefits of Feedburner without actually using their feed address.

To do so, you just need to:
1. Burn your feed at Feedburner (if you don’t already have a feed address)
2. Place this code in your Rss Feed Page. (I believe it’s wp-feed.php for WordPress)
$feedburnerfeed="http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourfeedhere";
$ch = curl_init();
$useragent=$_SERVER[’HTTP_USER_AGENT’];
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $useragent);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $feedburnerfeed);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);

Option 2: Use Feedburner’s MyBrand Service
Feedburner offers a great service called MyBrand, which allows you to use your own domain as your feed address. The way this works is you:
1) Set up a new subdomain like feeds.yourdomain.com
2) Add a new CNAME record that points that subdomain to FeedBurner
This way, you’re still redirecting to feedburner, but you have the option to redirect that address anywhere you want. So if FeedBurner went down, I could always redirect back to the original feed if I needed to.

Don’t get me wrong here. I think feedburner is a great service. I just don’t like not being in control of my content.

Update: I finally heard back from FeedBurner support, and guess what? This whole fiasco was my own fault. I fouled it up while trying to set up a new subdomain to use with Feedburner’s MyBrand service. I’ll chalk it up to not understanding my new hosting admin interface yet. Sort of embarrassing, but hopefully I’ll be able to switch over to the MyBrand service now.

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