Nora Brown Design

I'm on top of RSS, now what is Feedburner?

So I faced up to the reality of RSS. But the purpose of Feedburner still eluded me. So I signed up for an account. Basically the purposed of Feedburner is to pump up your RSS feed. It does this by:

• Increasing compatibility with a wide range of RSS readers
• Giving you access to feed subscriber stats
• Offering email-based subscriptions
• Allowing you to include advertising to “monetize” your feed
• Optionally adding other “FeedFlare” like Twitter and PayPal donate links

And offering a number of other “add-ons” to your RSS feed.

Unfortunately, Feedburner gets some bad reviews here and there, but doesn’t currently have a viable competitor. I’m not sure if the Google buyout is the source of the problem, but people seem to have a lot of complaints. Just in the short time I’ve had an account, I have noticed wild fluctuations in my subscriber stats that can’t reflect reality, but that really doesn’t bother me too much.

For now, I would recommend Feedburner with reservations: it’s free, easy to use and manage, and offers a lot of options, but be aware that the stats are unreliable.