Feedburner is a great service that serves your RSS (or ATOM) feed for you. What makes them great is they collect stats on RSS feeds, items clicked, and other things which give the website owner lots of useful information, as well some cool widgets. But there is a potential problem of 'lock in' by serving feeds through Feedburner. Feedburner achknowledge this. Yet many very high quality sites seem not to realise, so here's a tip on how to use Feedburner, without getting 'locked in'.

Using Feedburner

Just submit your feed to them, they'll 'burn' it, then replace the link to your own feed on your website (obscured to all but Feedburner and those that sign up to it directly) with a link to feedburner's feed (feedburner update their feed with your site's now obscured original feed). Very simple.

The Problem

The feed new users on your website will now see is http://feeds.feedburner.com/YOURSITENAME, where YOURSITENAME is whatever you called it during the 'burning' process.

This is a problem. All of your visitors are saving feedburner's link, and not your own. Did you have a Hotmail account when Gmail came along and find it a pain to switch to an email provider with better services (because everyone still had your Hotmail address and you were afraid of losing something)? Did you have a Geocities account which a lot of users had bookmarked, wanted to switch to a new webhost, but also had to keep the old one active (so new users would see where to go)? The same problem exists with linking to a Feedburner feed. These problems can be worked around, but there's a better way.

If a new company, providing a better service than Feedreader comes along, you're in a mess. New users may go to the new feed, while old users go to the old feed. The advantages of statistical analysis become diluted. If, not that they will, but it is possible, Feedreader started doing something with your feed that you didn't like (non opt-out adverts, charging for services others offered for free, for example) your feed provision and analysis may suffer All of these points are not certaintities, or maybe even probable, but they are possible.

How to solve this problem? You need your readers to bookmark the address of your feed, www.YOURSITENAME.com for example, but get redirected to feeds.feedburner.com/YOURSITENAME. If at any time in the future you want to switch feed provider (just link switching email provider) all that needs to be done is to redirect them.

Solution

This assumes you're running your own site, and not shared blogging, like ME.blogger.com. For shared blogging the below may be impossible, I just don't know what kind of server/application access you guys get.

Your site's feed exists, YOURSITENAME.com/rss.xml, for example. Set Feedburner up to copy from this feed, and obscure it on your website (no one should be able to link to this feed, it continues to exist and function but becomes a 'private', invite-only feed). Create a second file named something link YOURSITENAME.com/publicrss.xml, link it on your website as the RSS feed, and using .htaccess redirect this to the feed at feeds.feedburner.com/YOURSITENAME (add a line to the .htaccess file "Redirect temp NYSITENAME.com/publicrss.xml http://feeds.feedburner.com/MYSITENAME).

Now, any user who wants to view your feed can do so as normal (using Feedburner for it's cool features), but if at any time in the future your want to change feed provider, all you need to do is change the redirect to the new feed provider (telling this new feed provider the original rss.xml feed to link from) and ALL of your viewers will instantly be redirected to the new feed provider.

For Wordpress and Drupal Users

There are pluggins/modules that will help you do this. For Wordpress instructions go here and for Drupal it's as easy as installing the module.