Redirect Your RSS Feed To FeedBurner
This article applies to any kind of redirect you want to do for your website, but I am writing it in regards to RSS feeds and FeedBurner.
Sometimes you want to redirect surfers who come to your site so they can no longer access a specific file or page. You could just remove the file/page, but then they get a Page Not Found error or something else that might discourage them from coming to your site. The nice way is to do a redirect.
Why Do I Want To Redirect?
There can be any number of reasons. I mentioned above the you don't want them to access the old file and it is not nice to just deny them or give them a Page Not Found error.
Another reason is that you have switched to FeedBurner to handle your RSS feed. If you do not know what an RSS feed is and you read a lot of websites then please read my article Adding FeedBurner to Your Website. It includes information about what an RSS feed is.
Why would you switch to FeedBurner? They provide a number of different features for RSS feeds. Basically all they do is republish your RSS feed. You provide them with a link to your RSS file and they start pulling it for themselves and publishing it.
When people subscribe to your RSS feed, they use the republished version through FeedBurner. They are getting the exact same content, but now FeedBurner can monitor the usage of it. This is useful to know how many unique readers there were in a given day, what links they clicked on in the feed, they can publish targeted advertising in your feed for added revenue, and other statistics can be kept.
So back to why you want to redirect. If you already have people subscribing to your RSS feed or you don't know if you do, then you need to provide an elegant way to transfer these people over to your re-published feed.
Note: If you started off with FeedBurner to begin with, then you do not need to do this.
What I Did?
My RSS feed was http://thoughtsfrommylife.com/rss.xml in the beginning. This was the link on my site that people used and could use this address in their feed reader settings for my site.
When I re-published with FeedBurner, the RSS link that I wanted everyone to use was http://feeds.feedburner.com/ThoughtsFromMyLife. You should use a new RSS file though. One that noboday knows the url for. This way, no one can get to your feed without going through FeedBurner. You set this up with FeedBurner when you get your account.
But we still have the original feed readers hanging around using the old file. So to get people using the first link to use the next one without them doing any work is by creating a re-direct.
With an Apache web server, there is a file called .htaccess. In here, the owner of the site can provide instructions on handling certains types of requests. Denying them, requiring a password, and for us re-directing them.
I added a line in there for my rss.xml file that looks like the following. This should be all on one line by the way.
Redirect temp /rss.xml http://feeds.feedburner.com/ThoughtsFromMyLife
Now anyone who tries to access the file rss.xml will be automatically redirected to the FeedBurner one without them knowing. Now I can collect stats on them and use advertising, etc. There are no black holes in my data for the feed.
You can do this re-direct for a lot of other reasons, but if you are doing the FeedBurner one then this is how to do it (on Linux). So the basic steps are:
- Create a second RSS feed file and DO NOT publish the link for it anywhere.
- Get an account on FeedBurner.
- Add your blog on FeedBurner and use the link to the new RSS file.
- Add a redirect line in your .htaccess file from your old feed to the FeedBurner one.
If you enjoyed this post, then make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed or subscribe for email updates. Only one email a day and only if there was a new post.
Related Posts
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FeedBurner Problems - My Own Fault
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Adding FeedBurner to Your Website
The Ups And Downs Of FeedBurner
Category: Blogging
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