5 thoughts on “Video: Stay in Control of Your RSS Feed from PodCampAZ 2009”

1. Douglas, this was a very interesting segment. Not sure how I’ll ever be in complete control of my feed though. We use feedburner for our blog & audio enclosure. We also have a feed through Libsyn and that feeds into iTunes.

   Also, if we didn’t use Feedburner, we’d have no way of allowing people to subcribe to our feed via email. Our demo tends to be older and this is an option that is popular. The only problem with email subscription is that there isn’t an audio player. There is a link to download the audio file or to click on the audio file to have it open with your computers default player.

   Will look into Feedsmith plugin you’ve mentioned.

   Thanks for this informational post.

2. Well, the major first step is only publishing a feed from your site instead of any 3rd part feed, including Feedburner. This involves creating a re-direct using either the .htaccess, php redirect or the Feedsmith plugin for folks using Feedburner. This allows you to then point that address anywhere you might want to in the future, without the subscribers knowing or caring. For example, you create a re-direct (or use Feedsmith) to allow subscribers to subscribe to http://welchwrite.com/career/feed/. This then transparently re-directs them to the Feedburner feed. Then, of you decide to use some other service, or use your own local RSS feed, you simply change that re-direct to point to that service or back locally. The subscribers will never notice and you won’t have to ask them to re-subscribe.

   That is really you main goal — never having to ask subscribers to re-subscribe to a new feed. That can cause you to lose a significant number of subscribers. You will get some of them back, but usually not all.

   You can still use Feedburner for email subscriptions whether or not you give people the actual RSS feed to subscribe to. Since email subs happen in their own form, the end user really doesn’t notice or care.

3. What would be the generic podcast feed through wordpress? Would we use Feedsmith or redirect for that feed too? I believe its biggsuccess.com/feed=podcast or something like that. So, would I use Feedsmith or redirect for both the regular feed and the podcast feed?

4. Typically the main feed is http://domain.com/blog/feed/ The direct link is usually http://domain.com/blog/wp-rss2.php.

   Feedsmith should direct all the built-in feeds to the Feedburner account. Looking at your podcast URL, though, might you be using Podpress to manage the podcast? That looks like a Podpress/Powerpress naming convention. If so, you don’t necessarily need to use Feedburner for anything besides the email subs, as Powerpress/Podpress give you everything else that Feedburner does.

   Each installation is different, so we would probably have to talk more about what you have set up already and how we would need to work with that.

5. Great, thanks. We do use Podpress, but not it’s feed function at all. Just the player for our blog post. I’ll catch you on NMI chat.