Comments on: Host your own damn feeds! Provide alternative to Feedburner unacceptable dominance!

By: Richard Ford

Richard Ford — Tue, 23 Oct 2007 10:53:25 +0000

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….

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 16:18:09 +0000

Ah! I did not know it is something that you can turn off. Neat! Seems you’re on top of this!

By: zhwj

zhwj — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 02:44:42 +0000

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

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 01:18:39 +0000

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

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 22 Oct 2007 01:07:00 +0000

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.

By: fiLi

fiLi — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 05:20:58 +0000

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.

By: zhwj

zhwj — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 23:58:57 +0000

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.

By: Feeds Follow-up - Chinalyst + Feedburner = same problem at Chris’ Website

Feeds Follow-up - Chinalyst + Feedburner = same problem at Chris’ Website — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 21:37:21 +0000

[...] response to my previous post on questioning the use of services like feedburner (especially when feedburner doesn’t really work in [...]

By: Chris

Chris — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 21:06:18 +0000

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-

By: zhwj

zhwj — Fri, 19 Oct 2007 14:48:49 +0000

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