I’m going to have to call out my good friend James Archer for inspiring this entry so hopefully he doesn’t mind me using him as an example. Recently I have decided I would give FeedBurner another shot. I used them when they first came out, but there were a lot of bugs and what not that made my feeds almost unreadable so I was curious to see if things had improved any. Unfortunately to use their service you must also use their feed url instead of your own.
Thank god for .htaccess.
With the way we experiment with services and technologies it can be a pain sometimes having to fix everything up whenever a slight change is made. Who knows if another feed service will pop up that blows FeedBurner out of the water? Will you stay with FeedBurner because all of your feed links point to it or will you go through the hassle of not only redirecting the original feed to the new feed service, but also adding another rule in your .htaccess that redirects the FeedBurner url to the new service? Mr. Archer has a link that points to the FeedBurner url and hopefully he never changes services in the future because he will have to add a rule in his .htaccess file. Imagine if he changed services 10 different times over the next couple of years. He might get stuck in an infinite redirect loop (maybe that would be cool though), but that might only happen if he continues to change the feed link on the site.
All is not lost for James though since he simply has to redirect his audience from the FeedBurner feed to the new one and can stick with that rule for the lifetime of his site. I like the idea that everyone points to this feed and are redirected to whatever service I choose to redirect them towards all through one rule in the .htaccess file. Try to keep all links on your site pointing to your site because you never know what the future holds.
Originally posted on May 20, 2006 @ 12:04 pm