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Heads Up – Migrating Away From FeedBurner Is More Trouble Than It Looks

feedburner-logo[1]This is just a quick note to let my readers know that the RSS feeds for this blog will soon no longer be available via FeedBurner. If you want to continue to subscribe to this blog you might need to resubscribe (I’ll explain why later in the post).

I am making this move because I am one of the many, many bloggers that believe Google is going to shut down FeedBurner. We don’t know when it will happen, but given that Google has lately been pruning any services not focused on social there is a high probability that FeedBurner will end up on the chopping block.

I’ve already started moving a few feeds and unfortunately I have encountered a few problems.

It turns out that the transition isn’t quite as orderly as I was expecting. If you currently subscribe to the Appazonia feed (Amazon Appstore free app of the day) or The separate feed for The Morning Coffee posts, you will need to resubscribe.

If you don’t resubscribe (and you don’t use Feedly) there is a chance that you won’t get new posts. This is a little odd, so let me see if I can explain.

On Friday night I told FeedBurner to redirect those feeds to the original sources on this blog.  I chose the option of having a permanent 301 redirect, which i thought would guarantee that subscribers would continue to receive new posts.

Yeah, that didn’t work out quite as well as I expected. This next bit of news is worth remembering and sharing:

It turns out that only some of the news reader services know how to properly handle the redirect. The rest are simply pretending that there is no new content.

I don’t know which services are screwing this up, but I do know that my preferred news reader, BazQux, is one of them. I can also say that Feedly seems to be handling the move without issues, thank goodness.

All I can really say at this point is that if you didn’t get the post this morning about the free app, you need to resubscribe.

I wasn’t planning to make a big deal about the switchover, but given that I am encountering unexpected problems I thought this was an issue worth sharing.

And in case you were wondering, I have not yet made any changes to the main RSS feed for this blog but when I do I plan to announce it before hand. Clearly this is not something that can be done without warning.

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Comments


Simon July 14, 2013 um 7:02 pm

I dropped Feedburner last year along with all Google services at the time social results started showing up in their search returns. To me that was the sign to get out.

I use Mailchimp now for email subscriptions. You can configure it to send your RSS feeds out as emails. It has custom mail templates and many other features. It’s free below a certain number of subscribers. Definitely worth it.

Nate Hoffelder July 15, 2013 um 1:53 pm

Thanks for the suggestion.

I’m planning to give Mailchip a try. I’ve tried Feedblitz in the past and it wasn’t worth the cost. I hope mailchimp will be better.

Simon July 15, 2013 um 2:02 pm

I think we may be at the point where the cost for "free" internet services is to high. We may need to pay now for privacy and integrity.


Jeremy July 16, 2013 um 2:58 am

I think it’s inevitable that Google will drop it but I’m going to wait until that happens. The alternative is MailChimp or another similar service which I think is about $50-75 a month will my subscribers. Not worth it to make the move now, especially while Feedburner is still doing what I need it to do.

Nate Hoffelder July 21, 2013 um 7:00 am

The problem with waiting is that when the end is announced there’s going to be a scramble to move to another service. If you have trouble you will only be able to get partial attention from a CS tech. You’ll be lost among a crowd of many, many other blogs that are migrating away from FeedBurner.

I say do it now.


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