The Problem
You may have noticed that my RSS feed icon is now displaying in the sidebar.
I mentioned my feedburner problems the other day, and I’m pleased to report that it’s finally solved. For anyone else out there considering Feedburner, this is something you may want to keep in mind.
It turns out that my problem was my server’s response time. It seems that if a server doesn’t respond within ten seconds, Feedburner gives up, and that’s what was happening to me. My host did something (they didn’t tell me what), and fixed the issue. I suspect that they were throttling the connection.
So…. if you try to burn a feedburner feed and get a “connect timed out” error, check your hosting provider and make sure they’re not throttling (or blocking) the IP range for Feedburner. I won’t post that here for fear that that is some violation of service, but if you open a help desk ticket with them, they’ll give it to you.
Why you should care about RSS
So why did I spend so much time trying to get my RSS feed working with Feedburner?
Most blog software platforms allow you to create an RSS feed, which in turn enables visitors to read your blog in their reader instead of visiting your site. Why would you want that, especially if you’re running ads on your site?
From the user’s perspective, using an RSS reader is a lot more convenient than visiting the blog itself. If you have several blogs you read routinely, it’s simpler to glance through a list of them in a reader, which will tell you which have unread posts, than to visit each site individually. The more blogs you read, the more time you save with a reader.
As a blogger, you certainly may lose some site traffic to RSS feeds, but not providing one is far worse, in my opinion. You want people to read you, first and foremost, and if giving them an RSS feed encourages that, so much the better.
Hence, Feedburner
Feedburner allows you to re-route your RSS feed through their service, and they in turn collect and report stats on your subscribers. Since I just got started with them this morning, I can’t give you more details than that.
We’ll see how things go over the next weeks, and don’t forget to subscribe to my feed if you haven’t already.