Last night, a glitch in Feedburner’s system filled our Twitter stream with tweets from bloggers concerned about their site feeds.
Feedburner, a web feed (RSS) management tool, has been a valuable tool in the blogger’s toolbox for many years.
A few years back, Google acquired it, made some changes, and then promptly stopped developing and improving it. This worked fine, until it was announced that on October 20th, the API would be closing. This, along with the fact that Google had let the Feedburner.jp domain expire, and closed the Feedburner Twitter account over 60 days ago, led many to believe that their feeds were doomed.
So, what can you do?
First of all — don’t panic. While there is a glitch going on right now, Google is working on it and Feedburner has not shut down. Your subscribers are not lost.
With that said, given some of the recent actions/inactions on Feedburner’s part, it is probably a wise idea to look for a new RSS Feed Management tool.
I’ve listed some below, along with some brief summaries of each. Be sure to follow the summary tips at the bottom of the post as well.
Feeburner Alternatives:
Feedblitz (paid)
While this is a paid service (fee-based; fees are based on the number of email subscriptions), it includes much more than just RSS. It brings together RSS feeds and email marketing into one
FeedBlitz is a service that monitors blogs, RSS feeds and Web URLs to provide greater reach for feed publishers. FeedBlitz takes all the headache out of converting feed and blog updates into email digests, delivered daily to subscribers’ inboxes. FeedBlitz manages subscriptions, circulation tracking, testing, and is compatible with all major blogging platforms and services such as Blogger, WordPress, FeedBurner, Joomla, Drupal and Typepad. Unlike other blogmail services, FeedBlitz is reliable, scalable and fully supported. No betas, wish lists or road map items here. You’re in production, and so is FeedBlitz.
FeedBlitz also enables end users to monitor any feed or blog, anonymously if they wish, regardless of whether the publisher of that feed is using FeedBlitz. FeedBlitz therefore provides a simple way for users to receive updates from their trusted sources using a familiar and ubiquitous medium – email.
Bonus: they also, they have a free Feedburner migration guide.
Feedcat (free)
This free RSS/ATOM service allows you to also track views, visits and other analytics.
Promote your feed content and measure audiences with FEEDCAT bookmarking, sharing and proxying service.
RapidFeeds (paid; free trial)
RapidFeeds is a web feed hosting and management provider founded in 2005. Services include traffic analysis (hits, feeds’ click-through rate, items’ click-through rate) and pinging to web-aggregators and directories. RapidFeeds not only manages but also hosts the feeds. RapidFeeds provides “browser-compatible” feeds so any browser will display the feed in a readable format with some subscription options. More sophisticated features include scheduling feeds to be updated with previously added content and password protection for feeds. The service also supports podcasting. Its iTunes Support offers an easy way to add more information about the podcast in the iTunes Store. (source: Wikipedia)
Feedity (paid; free trial)
Feedity is a revolutionary service for creating RSS feeds and generating podcast feeds from webpages. Feeds created with Feedity automatically update as new or updated content appears on the source webpage.
Feedity will take virtually any webpage and convert it into a fully formed RSS document for content publishing or subscription. Feedity aims to make it easy and possible for anyone to extract and reuse Web-based public content.
It might also be time to switch to a newsletter format
If your readership has really grown, or you are thinking about getting really serious about growing it, you might want to consider a newsletter instead. (Note: This is different from RSS, but might be a viable option for some)
In the meantime
You will want to save your current Feedburner email subscriber list.
Log into your Feedburner account >> “Email subscriptions” >> “View Subscriber Details” >> “Export CSV”. You will now have a spreadsheet document on your computer that you will be able to migrate/upload to other feed sites.
Need help?
Contact us, if you need help making the switch. We’re happy to discuss your options with you.
