FeedBurner, a service acquired by Google for managing feeds, is a popular free tool that has proved useful to website administrators and social media managers in the past.
It can be used for a variety of tasks—saving rss and xml feeds for future reading, keeping track of website updates, analyzing traffic, and automatically posting new blog updates to Twitter, Facebook, and other popular social media platforms. Visitors to blogs and websites could also use FeedBurner to share posts and subscribe to updates via email.
Despite appearing useful, however, FeedBurner seems to have been shoved to the back of the shelf, with its APIs being retired, and its history of technical difficulties. Fortunately, there are alternatives that bloggers and site administrators, whether on WordPress or other platforms, can use.
Default WordPress feeds
In order to display your website’s feed and let users subscribe to it using their favorite feed reader, you can use the default WordPress feeds.
You can control your WordPress site’s feeds using the Admin Dashboard. Simply click on Settings then go to Reading. From here, you can view the traffic your posts are getting through the feeds—traffic is divided into On-site views and Syndicated views.
To view the feed for a WordPress site, simply add “/feed/” to the end of the URL in your browser’s web address bar. For example, to see the WordPress blog’s feed, simply type http://en.blog.wordpress.com/feed/ in your browser’s address bar.
Other feeds that visitors can follow include feeds for comment threads, categories, tags, and authors. To see the feeds for a particular site, simply replace the URL of the WordPress blog with your desired web address.
- Comments: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/comments/feed/
This allows you to see the comments posted by visitors on a website. Simply add “/comments/feed/” to the end of your website URL. - Category: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/category/features/feed/
This allows you to see the updates to a particular category. Replace the URL, and then change “features” to the name of your desired content category. - Tag: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/tag/themes/feed/
This lets you see the updates to a particular tag. Replace the URL, then change “themes” to the tag that you want to monitor. - Authors: http://en.blog.wordpress.com/author/matt/feed/
This allows you to see the latest posts written by a particular author. Change the URL, then replace “matt” with the username of the author whose updates you want to see.
To follow a particular post’s comments, you can subscribe to it by adding “/feed/” to the end of the web address.
Mailing lists
Instead of users subscribing to public post updates on your website or blog and getting alerts only when there is a public post, you can send them customized updates via e-mail, by using mailing list services.
There are several services available, including MailChimp and Aweber, which also let your subscribers choose when to get updates regarding your site. For example, through a newsletter that can be sent daily, weekly, and monthly.
Pushing updates to social
One useful feature of FeedBurner is that it also allows you to push updates to Twitter. There are several platforms that allow you to do this for free, including TwitterFeed, Hootsuite, and IFTTT (If This Then That). However, some services are only free up to a point, asking users for a fee for added features.
Paid services
While there are free tools to manage feeds, there are also paid alternatives to FeedBurner. These provide technical support to users and a streamlined way to view traffic and feeds.
Some examples are FeedPress, and feedblitz. These alternatives offer a wide range of services which include migration of feeds from FeedBurner, mailing lists, podcast hosting, and analytics, among others.