Hellcast
Jun 26th, 2007, 07:02 AM
I dont see what is so special about switching to feedburner. Can someone give me pros and cons?
RobotsLove
Jun 26th, 2007, 08:25 AM
http://marshallk.com/how-and-why-to-use-feedburner this seems to skim over the topic pretty well. I don't use feed burner so I have no personal opinion on it.
WyethDigital
Jun 26th, 2007, 07:13 PM
If you don't own your own domain (i.e. -- you're hosting it somewhere and just using a form of their domain as your URL --> www.theirdomain.com/yourpodcastsite) you should be using Feedburner. Why? Because if you ever change hosting companies, you will not be able to easily migrate your audience to the new RSS feed. You will lose most of your audience.
However, if you use FeedBurner and you change your hosting company, all you have to do is reassign the new URL to your Feedburner feed and all of your audience will be automatically migrated without missing a beat.
Additionally, Feedburner has some nice bells and whistles that can be added to your feed to make it more useful to users and to track different info. Of course, the free version is more limited in it's stats reporting than the premium version, but it's still very useful.
A con would be that as far as making your feed portable, nothing beats owning your own domain. And if Feedburner ever quits what it does, or starts to suck, you'll be in the same boat that you would be in if you changed hosting companies without owning your own domain (see the first paragraph).
We started out not using Feedburner and hosting our podcast on an e-commerce site of mine rather than finding it's own host. We pointed a domain at a page on my site, but the RSS URL was my e-commerce site's and not our domain. When interest and downloads increased and we had to move to our own host, we could have lost a lot of subscribers because of it; so I'm speaking from personal experience. We would have lost more if I didn't maintain a copy of my rss.xml on the server to this day. But most people won't have the luxury of keeping a copy on an old host.
So my advice, if you don't own your own domain, and you don't know if you will, then sign up with Feedburner. It's easy, it's free (unless you want to pay for the premium package), and it's portable.
Eric