Host your own damn feeds! Provide alternative to Feedburner unacceptable dominance!
Posted by: Chris in China, Commentary, Tech, WebsiteO.k, before you get smart with me and say something stupid like “Hey, Chris - just don’t use the web” or “Hey, Chris - why don’t you leave China - then you won’t have this problem…”, I have this to say to you: “Um, lameass, why don’t you just shoot yourself.”
I wrote a post about 3 weeks ago about the blocking of (access adjustments made to) Feedburner URLs in China. Rick from Feedburner was nice enough to submit a comment to my post. Rick basically said they know of the problem and are trying to work with the ISPs in China to find a workaround. (ok, those were my words from what I remember he wrote, I actually haven’t read his comment for ~3 weeks).
Well, so far, it’s still blocked. Best of luck to Feedburner/Google in hope these guys will start thinking rationally… Ain’t gonna work.
So, I ask this question: Why don’t website owners just host their own feeds? Many of these blogs, such as wordpress or moveable type, have the mechanics built-in already!
Could it be these Website owners want to get an accurate number of subscribers? Sorry, last I checked, feed subscriptions are passive. So the number of subscribers Feedburner provides (such as “you have 3823 subscribers”) is bogus. Please. Correct me if I’m wrong.
I don’t see any other reason to use Feedburner, exclusively. (Again, please, someone shed some light on this). Perhaps you want to monetize your feeds by placing ads? There are other ways to do this! (i.e. adding adsence code in your feeds).
If people insist on using Feedburner, or similar, why can’t you also provide a link to your original feed URL as well. Richard wised up and did this! (Thank’s Richard!) Bjorn also wrote about this.
What really erks me is China-focused blogs using Feedburner, only. Do these guys have any clue what’s going on in China??!
- Chinalyst - A nice feed aggregator for China-specific English blogs. Their main feed is using Feedburner. Are these guys even in China?
- Shanghaiist - You are a blog “about Shanghai”
- There’s many more, but I don’t think I need to waste my time listing all of them. Go to Chinalyst and look for yourself.
Let’s all wake up and not alienate your readers in China! (Those of us who are interested in China, who live in China, and who read your China-focused blogs)
And no, using Tor is not always an option, thank you.
Update Oct, 20: Joel from Danwei left a rather sarcastic comment for this post which kind of put the jokes on me… I apologize for somehow overlooking the fairly clear “china safe” feed links. But my original question stands: why not host your own feed?
Entries (RSS)
October 19th, 2007 at 10:48 pm
And what really irks me is when we go to the trouble of putting up mainland-enabled Feedsky links for all three major Danwei RSS feeds and I get accused of ignoring our audience. They’re all linked off the sidebar (heck, the main posts feed from Feedsky is linked off a rel tag in the header for maximum browsing convenience). –Joel
October 20th, 2007 at 5:06 am
Joel, Many thanks for submitting a comment!
Indeed you do. My apologies. For some odd reason, I’m stupid and didn’t see the bolded links!
But, my original question still stands: why not host your own feed? Why do you need to use a service like feedburner or feedsky?
That’s a friendly question - I am truly interested to know why…
Thanks-
October 20th, 2007 at 5:37 am
[…] response to my previous post on questioning the use of services like feedburner (especially when feedburner doesn’t really work in […]
October 20th, 2007 at 7:58 am
Well, it’s kind of embarrassing to admit this, but the main reason’s technical incompetence. It’s easier just to point people at an external server, which makes any changes to the feed URL on our end transparent, rather than worrying about redirects and refresh limits. The stat magic is kind of nice, too (even if we’ve had to turn off link tracking because of the block). You’re right that it’s not entirely accurate, but the same would be true of any stats we could collect ourselves from a feed hosted on our own server, and Feedburner does it without any script installation on our part.
On your follow-up post, I don’t see where Feedburner is related to Chinalyst - it’s hosted outside of China, right? The posts are still showing up there.
October 20th, 2007 at 1:20 pm
It’s just one guy, and “we’re” in Taiwan. Chinalyst feed is also available at http://www.chinalyst.net/rss.xml
I’ve posted a request to the bloggers on Chinalyst to change to non-Feedburner feeds, though I doubt if any of them will.
There are several reasons why Feedburner is a much more sensible option than just directing users to our own feed, but I’d rather not go into that discussion. No one saw this coming.
Thanks for raising this issue, I’m sorry for the trouble.
October 22nd, 2007 at 9:07 am
fiLi,
Thanks for commenting on my post! It’s great that website owners actually read other blog’s postings about their sites.
Regarding your rss link you provided in your comment, I figured that out, thanks!
The main problem now, is that even though we can use the non-feedburner feed for Chinalyst, many of the sites listed in Chinalyst provided feedburner feeds (danwei is an example). So even though we can read the Chinalyst feeds without trouble (using the link you provided), if we want to click on an article from a site who happens to use feedburner in their Chinalyst configuration will result in the feedburner problem.
October 22nd, 2007 at 9:18 am
zhwj (danwei), see my comment I just left on this post. That’s how feedburner relates to Chinalyst.
Yes, Chinalyst is in Taiwan. But you still use your feedburner feed in the Chinalyst configuration, so those of us in China (you, too?) cannot click on the article title and go to your site, as feedburner would be in the middle.
Checking Chinalyst, it seems you changed something? I don’t see this issue with your feed anymore. An example, though, is the blog “All Roads Lead to China”, http://www.chinalyst.net/node/24175
October 22nd, 2007 at 10:44 am
Chris, that’s only a problem if the Feedburner user has click tracking set up. We had that enabled for a while, but we turned it off when the service got blocked (the same time that we set up the Feedsky feeds, actually). All current Danwei headlines as served up in Chinalyst (or Google Reader or Bloglines) click through to the site itself without any intermediate routing. –Joel
October 23rd, 2007 at 12:18 am
Ah! I did not know it is something that you can turn off. Neat! Seems you’re on top of this!
October 23rd, 2007 at 6:53 pm
The only reason I went to feedburner initally was for the email subscription option. Being 30 - most of my friends grew up with the net in the mid nighties and are, well email bound. People my age don’t really get into the whole twitter and RSS stuff…..that is very tween like and “My Space” generation.
Feed burner lets people sign up like they are used to for many years and just get a digest email once a day into their inbox. Feedburner lets you a header on the emails and does a few other nice things too….