Essential FeedBurner questions

Blogger

WordPress

TypePad

MySpace

Podcasting

Introductory Videos

Account Administration

FeedBulletin

MyBrand

Tips and frequently asked questions

General problems with feeds

Problems with podcasts

Analyze

SmartCast/Podcasting

BrowserFriendly

Link Splicer

SmartFeed

FeedFlare

Monetize

Headline Animator

PingShot

Email Subscriptions

BuzzBoost

FeedCount

---

What are feeds? I see "RSS", "XML", and "Atom" out there, but I don't know how I might use these links when I find them.

Feeds are a way for websites large and small to distribute their content well beyond just visitors using browsers. Feeds permit subscription to regular updates, delivered automatically via a web portal, news reader, or in some cases good old email. Feeds also make it possible for site content to be packaged into "widgets," "gadgets," mobile devices, and other bite-sized technologies that make it possible to display blogs, podcasts, and major news/sports/weather/whatever headlines just about anywhere.

What Does This Mean?

You may recognize the universal feed icon or these "chicklets" from your favorite websites, blogs, and podcasts. These icons represent content in any format - text, audio or video - to which you can subscribe and read/watch/listen using a feed reader. What's that?

Why is This a Good Thing?

Technology evolution in online publishing has made it really easy to not only publish regular updates to web-based content, but also keep track of a large number of your favorite websites or blogs, without having to remember to check each site manually or clutter your email inbox. You can now streamline your online experience by subscribing to specific content feeds and aggregating this information in one place to be read when you're ready.

Who publishes feeds?

Most of the biggest names on the web offer content feeds including USATODAY.com, BBC News Headlines, ABCNews, CNET, Yahoo!, Amazon.com (including a podcast!), and many more. Google publishes feeds as part of many of our services; for example, you can get a feed of new items for any search you make in Google News. In addition, hundreds of thousands of bloggers, podcasters, and videobloggers publish feeds to keep themselves better connected to their readers, listeners, admirers, and critics. Apple, through its iTunes Music Store, offers tens of thousands of audio and video podcasts for download, each of which is powered by a feed.

How do I read feeds?

If you want to browse and subscribe to feeds, you have many choices. Today, there are more than 2,000 different feed reading applications, also known as "news aggregators" (for text, mostly) or "podcatchers" (for podcasts). There are even readers that work exclusively on mobile devices.

Some require a small purchase price but are tops for ease-of-use and ship with dozens of feeds pre-loaded so you can explore the feed "universe" right away. Free readers are available as well; a search for "Feed reader" or "Feed aggregator" at popular search sites will yield many results. A handful of popular feed readers are listed at the bottom of this page.

A typical interface for a feed reader will display your feeds and the number of new (unread) entries within each of those feeds. You can also organize your feeds into categories and even clip and save your favorite entries (with certain applications).

If you prefer, you can use an online, web-based service to track and manage feeds. Online services give you the advantage of being able to access your feed updates anywhere you can find a web browser. Also, upgrades and new features are added automatically.

How can I publish my own feeds?

If you have a website, blog, audio/video content, or even photos, you can offer a feed of your content as an option. If you are using a popular blogging platform or publishing tool like TypePad, Wordpress, or Blogger, you likely publish a feed automatically. Even other non-blogging sites like social photo-sharing service Flickr offer feeds of content you produce that others can retrieve. There are also tools on the market that can help transform traditional web content into the right format for distribution.

FeedBurner's services allow publishers who already have a feed to improve their understanding of and relationship with their audience. Once you have a working feed, run it through FeedBurner and realize a whole new set of benefits.

And finally, some technical backstory...

The new method for easily distributing online content is often called a web feed and the technical format that makes it possible is called RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary, and/or Rockdale, Sandow, and Southern (Railroad) if you trust the good folks at AcronymFinder.com. RSS is based on XML, a widely used standard for textual information exchange between applications on the Internet. RSS feeds can be viewed as plain text files, but they're really designed for computer-to-computer communication.

We should point out that RSS is just one standard for expressing feeds as XML. Another well-known choice is Atom. Both formats have their boosters, and it doesn't appear that consolidation toward a single standard is imminent. However, most feed subscribers simply want fresh content and don't care at all about the underlying protocol. (FeedBurner helps publishers avoid this quandary with our SmartFeed service, which makes any feed format readable on any subscriber device.)

Resources:

Feed-Related Backgrounders

Popular Feed Readers

Applications

Online Services

Podcast Readers

If you use Blogger, TypePad, or self-hosted WordPress to publish your blog or site, you're in luck! Each of these platforms offers an automated option to greatly simplify how to activate redirection. Visit the QuickStart Guides section of this Help Center and follow the instructions for your platform to get started with FeedBurner and ultimately redirect 100% of your feed traffic to your FeedBurner feed.

However, if you are using a publishing system other than one of those listed above, you may not have an immediate, automated solution for redirecting feed traffic properly. The following discussion offers suggested approaches (and is meant for advanced publishers who are comfortable changing and controlling specific web server settings.)

This tip only works if you have control over the HTTP directives for your web server (for example, you can author and edit .htaccess file(s) if you use an Apache web server). The original procedure for pointing your existing feed to the burned version of the feed, dating to 2004, is exhaustively detailed in a Forums Tech Tip. This section provides a little more detail calls attention to a "gotcha" to be aware of.

Here is a basic illustration of feed traffic. You start out with feed readers requesting your feed as usual:

The next step is to generate your feed to a different file name (shown as fb-index.xml in this example) and you point FeedBurner at that new file. Then, you use your web server to redirect any access for the original file (index.xml) to the feeds.feedburner.com URL.

You have now maintained control of your feed. If you decide that you don't want to use FeedBurner's services any more, you can either change the redirect to your private feed (index.xml goes to fb-index.xml) or you can just go back to generating your feed to the original file (index.xml) and get rid of the redirects.

One gotcha: please remember to point FeedBurner at the new, private feed URL! If you instead point FeedBurner at the original URL, everything will go around in a big circle as FeedBurner attempt to read your source feed, which points to the Feedburner feed, which points to the source feed, and on and on.

Now, we actually trap this condition so it does not cause trouble for your web server or FeedBurner itself: FeedBurner just serves up the most recent content we were able to retrieve. But if you do this redirect trick and it looks like your feed isn't being updated, check to make sure you haven't fallen prey to this infinite redirect gotcha.

Yes. FeedBurner will not accept feeds that are larger than 512K. It's rare for a feed to be larger than 512K, but some publishing tools generate their original source feeds with no limit to how far back in time they will reach to include items. Such feeds are vulnerable to steady size increases.

If you currently publish an existing FeedBurner feed, and the original source feed exceeds the 512K limit, FeedBurner will not update the 'burned' version of your feed until the original drops below the limit. For most feeds this will never be an issue -- but if you know that your content postings are regularly very large in size, you might want to keep any eye on the original feed's file size.

Note #1: FeedBurner should proactively notify you of a 'feed health' issue like this and help you avoid any service interruption. It's (still) on the list! If you use Blogger, you may follow these steps to reduce your feed file size below 512K if it currently too big.

Note #2: Publishers of podcast feeds that point to an MP3, torrent, or other binary file do not have anything new to worry about -- the size of the binary file that's merely linked from your feed has no impact on your feed's calculated size.

Nothing.

It stays where it is, and FeedBurner checks for updates approximately every 30 minutes. When FeedBurner detects changes in your original feed, those changes are read into FeedBurner and the updates are passed through to the FeedBurner "burned" version of your syndicated content in the ways you've specified. In a sense, the FeedBurner version of your feed becomes the public view of your syndicated content, and your original feed becomes a private feed that only you and FeedBurner know about.

Unfortunately, FeedBurner cannot generate feeds for websites that do not currently produce them. Virtually all blogs created by systems like Blogger and TypePad create their own 'standard' feeds which FeedBurner can locate and then use to create a FeedBurner feed.

If you want to try to 'autogenerate' a feed from your existing website's content, you may need to use an application like FeedForAll. Alternatively, you may consider creating a blog using Blogger or another publishing service, and then use the automatically-created feed that is associated with your new blog with FeedBurner. Any content updates you publish in this new blog will automatically end up in your FeedBurner feed, and it may be easier to use this 'new' site to publish updates than to try to redesign an existing site to accommodate feeds.

Nope.

FeedBurner only modifies your feed to the extent that the services you choose from our catalog require. We strongly believe publishers should retain creative and technical control over their work and that our services should only apply when chosen. FeedBurner does not sneak advertising into feed items or modify hyperlinks without your consent; if you see advertisements at the bottom of feed items, it means you (or the publisher whose FeedBurner feed you're viewing) has chosen to run them in their feed and is sharing the revenue. Also, our Item Stats service provides detailed clickthrough statistics by modifying links in your feed that point back to the original source. Again, these modifications only occur if you have chosen them and can be immediately reversed by deactivating the service.

FeedBurner can apply services to source feeds of the following formats:

RSS 0.90, 0.91, 0.92, 0.93, 0.94, 1.0, 2.0, and Atom.

As many as you want. Our services are designed so that you can apply one or several to your feed.

You may also want to generate more than one FeedBurner feed from your original feed. For example, say you want both a mobile version of your feed, and another version of your feed that incorporates a style sheet. You simply create two FeedBurner feeds using your same original source feed. In the future, as we continue to add more services, you may want to create many FeedBurner processed versions of your original feed!

Tracking 100% of your feed traffic: Redirecting your Blogger feed to your FeedBurner feed

Blogger can make sure all feed traffic for your blog content goes to your FeedBurner feed. This helps make sure your FeedBurner stats are comprehensive and accurate; even subscribers to the 'Original Feed' are routed through FeedBurner. To redirect your feed:

One of the ways to promote your FeedBurner feed on your Blogger site is by using FeedBurner's Publicity Tools to select a "chicklet" image to display a link to your FeedBurner feed from your blog's homepage.

If your feed is used for a podcast, you will need to make sure you're publishing a "full content" feed in order for FeedBurner's SmartCast service to pick up links to your audio files and generate enclosures for them. To verify your original Blogger site feed format is correct, follow these steps:

For the best results using FeedBurner with your self-hosted WordPress site, we recommend the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin (originally authored by the legendary Steve Smith). The plugin will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/feed/ or http://www.yoursite.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed and optionally, your main comments feed as well.

The plugin is currently compatible with downloadable WordPress versions 1.5 through 2.5. (Please note that “tag” feeds in later WordPress versions are not supported.)

Installation

Download the plugin, then follow the instructions below to begin forwarding all WordPress feed traffic to your FeedBurner feed.

Now all of your WordPress feed traffic should be redirected to FeedBurner.

Deactivation

To deactivate automatic forwarding of your feed traffic to FeedBurner, deactivate the plugin via the Plugins section of your WordPress Administration control panel.

To promote your FeedBurner feed on your Wordpress site, just use FeedBurner's Publicity Tools to select a "chicklet" image to display a link to your feed from your blog's homepage.

FeedBurner also offers our Email Subscription service, which uses your feed to send an update once each day that you make new post(s) to your blog. If you want to offer a link to subscribe to these email updates to your readers, visit and activate the Email Subscriptions service on the Publicize tab for your feed. Then, copy the "Subscription Link" code we offer into your blog as a "Text" widget under Presentation > Widgets in the WordPress Dashboard for your site.

Are you using WordPress for podcasting? If so, it's important to know that newer versions of WordPress will automatically convert linked MP3 files to RSS enclosures, but using our SmartCastâ„¢ service will guarantee maximum compatibility and reliability for your podcast. Either way, you will need to make sure you're publishing a "full text" feed so your links make it into the RSS feed. Here's how to verify your original WordPress site feed's format:

You're now ready to integrate your FeedBurner feed with your TypePad site!

Tracking 100% of your feed traffic: Redirecting your TypePad feed to your FeedBurner feed

The next step is to configure TypePad to use your enhanced FeedBurner feed instead of the default TypePad feed. TypePad will forward all requests for your original TypePad feeds to your FeedBurner feed. In so doing, FeedBurner will track 100% of your feed traffic, ensuring none of your subscriber or content item statistics are missed.

You're done! Existing and new subscribers will be automatically be forwarded to your FeedBurner feed, which means:

There are two ways to use FeedBurner's Publicity Tools. You can add the FeedBurner Subscribe Now "chicklet" or the FeedBurner Email Subscriptions functionality from your TypePad Widget Gallery in your TypePad account. Alternatively, instructions for adding a "subscribe chicklet" links are provided below:

You can now use FeedBurner's Publicity Tools to select a "chicklet" image to display a link to your FeedBurner feed from your MySpace page.

So, you created an audio program. You uploaded the files to a web server. You also publish a blog with posts that contain links to your audio/video files. What's next? Enter FeedBurner.

An RSS feed is the final step in transforming your collection of audio/video files into a bona fide podcast! With FeedBurner's SmartCast service, you can use any blogging tool that creates a feed to publish your podcast. Here's how it works: If your blog post contains a link (<a href=""></a>) to an audio/video file, we'll convert it to an RSS enclosure — a special link found only in your feed — that programs like iPodder, iTunes and NetNewsWire recognize. Google Reader and several other online readers also recognize enclosures and offer a playback link or audio control when they encounter them.

Podcasting News has a complete tutorial on publishing a podcast with Blogger and FeedBurner.

[ http://blogs.feedburner.com/pub/mov/FeedBurner-Podcast-Demo.mov ]

If your browser does not support iframes, please visit http://blogs.feedburner.com/pub/mov/FeedBurner-Podcast-Demo.mov

If your browser does not support iframes, please visit http://blogs.feedburner.com/pub/mov/FeedBurner-Blog-Demo.mov

If you want to transfer a feed between one FeedBurner account and another, follow these steps:

FeedBurner will contact this publisher by email and provide a link they must visit in order to sign into their own FeedBurner account and then accept the transfer. The transfer will occur immediately after they complete this process.

Feed transfer request emails are only valid for 72 hours. If the transferee doesn't accept the request within this window, you will have to issue a new request. Make sure the transferee checks their spam/junk folder for this message, as it may end up there by accident — it's a tough, unforgiving world out there, people.

Transferring feeds that participate in FeedBurner Ad Network

Unfortunately, you may not transfer a feed that participates in FeedBurner Ad Network (FAN); this constraint prevents the loss of important financial data associated with the original owner's account.

Not to fear! We recommend the following procedure to handle FAN feed transfers between publisher accounts:

In this way a new FeedBurner feed is created that effectively clones the original and allows any subscribers of the original one to transition smoothly to the new feed.

The time between completing step 1 and step 2 is a time during which the feed will be unavailable - so the the closer these two steps can be coordinated between the "original owner" and the "new owner" the better.

A Special Note about FeedBurner's own Email Subscription Service: In the FAN transfer scenario, since the new feed is a feed distinct from the original one, any email subscriptions from the original do not automatically transfer and any original 'Subscribe to my Feed via Email' forms on any blogs or sites will still point to the original feed unless they are changed to use the new feed's settings. FeedBurner can help you migrate the email subscribers from the old feed to the new one; post a note in our Forums and specify the feed address(es) involved. We will take it from there.

As a courtesy, FeedBurner offers publishers who delete a FeedBurner feed 30 days of complimentary traffic redirection. You can use this period to notify your subscribers of the change so they can update their feed readers with your original address.

During the first 15 days of this 30 day period, subscriber requests for your feed will be redirected to your original source feed. During days 16-30, this feed consists of a single content item that reads "This feed is no longer active. A new feed is located at" followed by the URL of your original feed.

After day 30, your feed will be permanently deleted and return an HTTP 404 (feed not found) message.

If you wish to permanently close your FeedBurner account, you may do so by choosing the "Close My Account…" option located in My Account.

Please note that you must first delete all of your feeds before closing your FeedBurner account.

As a general rule, you should not add FeedBulletin to any web-based news aggregator, such as Bloglines, My Yahoo!, or NewsBurst. These services will index your feed and make its contents searchable by anyone. You can apply username/password authentication to your feed to prevent it from being easily indexed, but it's better to be safe than sorry by not listing it in a web-based reader in the first place. It's best to use a desktop news aggregator, such as FeedDemon, Safari in Mac OS X Tiger, or NetNewsWire to subscribe to FeedBulletin.

By default, FeedBulletin only notifies you about problems FeedBurner encounters when processing your feed through our automatic FeedMedic service. However, we may add more personalized features to this feed in the future that permit you to receive traffic statistics, account-related notices, and other slightly more personal communications via RSS. We will always give you the choice of whether to include these communications in FeedBulletin; they will not appear unless you approve them.

Did you know that if you've created a user account on FeedBurner, you have your very own personal feed that we can use to communicate with you? You didn't? Go to the My Account page and click on FeedBulletin link on the left menu. You can just subscribe to this personal feed and we'll use that as our primary communication channel. FeedBulletin is used primarily to communicate any problems FeedBurner encounters during normal operation with your feed.

There are a few customization options FeedBulletin offers: you can choose whether you would like your feed to be password protected with your FeedBurner id and password. You can even get FeedBulletin updates via email in case you don't feel like subscribing to it as a feed.

Before we get into the technical details, let's be clear: this is not for the faint of heart. If you aren't sure whether you can modify DNS at your domain, or you don't have your own domain and instead maintain a blog at wordpress.com, livejournal.com, typepad.com or some other hosted provider, then MyBrand is NOT for you. Since we cannot provide DNS-specific support, we'd really appreciate you reading through this entire post, not just because it took us a long time to write it (it really did), but because it will ultimately save you time.

What MyBrand Really Does

MyBrand lets you create an alias at your domain so that you can "mask" your feed URL at FeedBurner. For purposes of this example, we're going to assume that your domain is "yourdomain.com" (yes, we're clever), and you have a feed that today is at feeds.feedburner.com/BestFeedEver. Once MyBrand is active, you can use feeds.yourdomain.com/BestFeedEver instead of feeds.feedburner.com/BestFeedEver. Cool, right?

Please note: This does not in fact change where your feed lives. The feeds.feedburner.com address is still valid, and feeds.yourdomain.com is just an alternate URL that users can use to access your feed. That's good news: all of your subscribers today will continue to get your feed content without having to resubscribe.

Several of you asked whether you could "redirect" your existing subscribers away from the feeds.feedburner.com address to the feeds.yourdomain.com address. Not really, no. Since they're both in fact the same feed (you've just created an alias that points at the FeedBurner URL), redirecting from one to the other would in fact create a loop. And nobody likes loops.

Can you help me modify my DNS records?

If you need a pointer on creating a CNAME at your domain, here are directions for GoDaddy users: http://help.godaddy.com/article.php?article_id=666&topic_id=163. Don't use GoDaddy? Contact your domain registrar and/or webhost for more guidance. Like we said up above, we can't help with DNS-specific issues on your domain because there are just too many domains out there.

What is a CNAME?

A CNAME is web-speak for an alias or shortcut from one Internet name to another. It allows you to say "Send all of the traffic for feeds.yourdomain.com to feeds.feedburner.com."

When will the changes I make become visible?

Sometimes, it can take as long as 24 hours for DNS change to propagate. We recommend you wait a full day before becoming alarmed.

How do I determine if I can even edit my CNAME?

Check with your domain registrar or web hosting provider to see if you have this capability.

Will my subscribers have to re-subscribe to my feed?

No.

What if I am unable to change my CNAME?

Some domain registrars may not allow you to edit your DNS records. Unfortunately, this is how MyBrand works! (Sorry.) If you really want to use MyBrand but can't edit your DNS records, consider switching to a different registrar.

Where do I go to activate MyBrand?

To get started:

What if I want to stop using MyBrand? What's the process for deactivating the service and what should I tell my domain registrar?

To stop using MyBrand:

A note about feed redirection

Those of you using the FeedSmith plugin for WordPress, or who use a custom server-side redirect to redirect feed subscribers from your site to ours, can update those redirects to use your new MyBrand-ed URL. Visit the control panel for your plugin (or edit the .htaccess file for your site if you're self-customizing the redirect), and change the FeedBurner URL from our domain to your own.

What is MyBrand?

MyBrand is a premium FeedBurner service that allows publishers to showcase their feeds by serving them from their own domain.

Who needs this service and why?

Bloggers, podcasters, webmasters, personal and commercial publishers who want subscribers to have a cohesive and transparent branded experience when accessing their online content.

What will it help publishers do that they can't do today?

FeedBurner has and will always provide free services to its publishers. These services allow publishers to apply a variety of publicity, optimization, and analytical services to feeds that are accessible through a FeedBurner domain. With MyBrand, publishers can continue to take advantage of all of FeedBurner's services, but provide a transparent experience by running everything through their domain (e.g. feeds.yoursitenamehere.com) instead of ours.

What are the technical requirements to use the service?

Publishers must have access to change their CNAME entry in the DNS records for the domain they wish to change. To configure MyBrand, log in to your FeedBurner account, select the My Account link and look for MyBrand in the left-hand column. There are three steps to set up the service. (View a screenshot of this configuration process.) Make sure that nothing resides on your MyBrand subdomain as requests for that subdomain are routed through FeedBurner. Additional technical FAQs are available.

How much does it cost and what methods of payment are accepted?

MyBrand is free!

How do you get started?

Publishers need only sign in to their FeedBurner account, review the instructions and activate the service from within My Account.

If you are a Blogger publisher and you've decided to use its new redirection feature to tightly connect your Blogger blog and your FeedBurner feed, you may want to change the link to the FeedBurner feed you provide on your site when using features like Chicklet Chooser and FeedCount. Why? Portability. Let us explain:

Once you redirect 100% of your feed traffic to your FeedBurner feed, you get a very complete picture of your feed-consuming audience, including where it's coming from and what content it's finding most popular in your feed. That's great. But if this audience is almost entirely subscribing to feeds.feedburner.com/myexcellentcontent, they will be stranded if, for some reason, you should choose to leave FeedBurner and revert back to your original feed address or some other service.

Since we believe publishers always should be in control of their content and how it's promoted, we think you should know you have the option of promoting your own original feed address instead of the FeedBurner feed if you use redirection. For example, let's say you used the Google subscription chicklet:

The HTML our ChickletChooser service would provide you is the following example:

<p><a href="http://fusion.google.com/add?feedurl=http://feeds.feedburner.com/MYFEEDADDRESS"><img src="http://buttons.googlesyndication.com/fusion/add.gif" width="104" height="17" alt="Add to Google Reader or Homepage"></a></p>

Assume your Blogger blog's address is http://myexcellentblog.blogspot.com. You would change the chicklet link code above to read as follows:

<p><a href="http://fusion.google.com/add?feedurl=http://myexcellentblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default"><img src="http://buttons.googlesyndication.com/fusion/add.gif" width="104" height="17" alt="Add to Google Reader or Homepage"></a></p>

But wait, you say. I thought this was the point - promote my feed so it gets used and I get all those lovely stats! (You said this with considerable urgency.) It still is the point, but since you're redirecting 100% of your traffic to FeedBurner, the FeedBurner feed will be used at all times. The thing is, if you ever decide to leave us, there will be no hard feelings, but more importantly none of your subscribers will be left high and dry, subscribed to a FeedBurner feed address you no longer use or possibly even deleted. By promoting your original feed link only, you make use of all of FeedBurner's features but make sure your subscribers stay with you, even if you leave FeedBurner.

To summarize: Redirect your feed, but retain your original address for the links you promote.

A favicon, short for "favorites icon," is a small graphic you can associate with your website for display in browsers like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Mozilla, Opera, Safari, iCab, and AOL Explorer. This icon appears in several places: in the browser's Location field, next to the site's name in a bookmarks list, with the site's title in a tab (if the browser uses tabs), and next to the site's feed as shown in many feed readers.

What does it look like?

If you don't have a favicon already, a search for favicon.ico reveals a number of sites that explain how to create an ICO file and how to host it on your website so that browsers and feed readers can locate it.

The problem with favicons and FeedBurner feeds stems from how different feed readers locate the favicon. Many use the address of the site provided in the top-level <link> tag of the feed to locate it (in this case, they will find yours, which works well with NetNewsWire and My Yahoo! right now, for example). Others, especially some desktop feed readers like FeedDemon, use the address of the feed itself and don't look back to the website (which means FeedBurner's favicon ends up getting the nod).

There is currently no solution for this issue; FeedBurner may offer one in the future; this topic will be updated to reflect any new capabilities.

FeedBurner will not process an original feed from your blog if it is greater than 512K in size. (This limitation only applies to the actual size of the feed file itself and does not include any images or media files you may have linked to or embedded in your posts.) To get a feed larger than 512K back down to size on Blogger, you need to add a parameter to the address for your original feed's URL — the one that FeedBurner checks for updates in order to keep your FeedBurner feed current — that tells Blogger to shorten it to a specific number of posts. To add this parameter:

podcasters: Don't ever want an episode to drop off of your feed? Set this value to 500. (What happens on episode 501? Pandemonium!)

Bloggers: Do you write lengthy posts and come up against FeedBurner's 512K limit to total feed size? You will want to set max-results to a small number in order to keep the feed file size under control. You may need to experiment with the max-results setting to get the ideal feed size. How to tell the filesize of your feed? Enter its address into www.web-sniffer.net and look at the report it returns; there should be a value in kilobytes for the size of your feed in an "uncompressed" format.

Unfortunately, that message means that FeedBurner consistently encounters "time out" states when trying to retrieve your source feed content. This means your web server isn't responding quickly enough to regular requests from our own feed poller, which requires a response within 10-15 seconds of initial contact. You may want to contact your hosting provider to ask them whether there is anything about your account or site configuration that might lead to slow response times to requests from FeedBurner.

The most likely reason is that your source feed is no longer valid. Don't worry, it's not really your fault.

All feeds are based on XML, which is a strict standard for marking up and organizing information as text. If you are familiar with HTML, the language of webpage composition, you'll see similarities in the syntax of RSS XML. However, many RSS readers (and FeedBurner) are unforgiving when it comes to malformed content in RSS. The reason is that XML documents must adhere to a defined set of rules for how they are structured, and breaking these rules leads to unpredictable results.

The first thing to check when your burned feed isn't current with your blog postings and source feed is the validity. Lucky for you, there are a lot of websites out that that will do this for you. We tend to use FeedValidator.

Just paste the URL for your source feed in the form at FeedValidator, and follow its recommendations for fixing the errors that it finds. (These recommendations, while well-written, usually aren't for web and XML novices, unfortunately. On the to-do list for FeedBurner is a "self-healing" service for malformed source feeds -- this service could repair easily fixable problems without any interaction required.)

Fine -- I give up. How did my feed become invalid?
Luckily, we've got that answer for you right here.

One of the nice features of FeedBurner is that we field all of the requests for your feed, which can save you a bunch of bandwidth. Instead of passing each request through to your site, we instead "cache" the feed on our servers. Every 30 minutes, FeedBurner will check back with your site to make sure that we have the latest version of your content.

"30 minutes!" you cry. "The world could change in 30 minutes. I need that burned feed updated immediately!". Fear not. You can also ping FeedBurner to say "Hey, my feed has been updated, so get the new copy right away". You can do this by pinging FeedBurner directly or by using the Ping-o-Matic service.

Your content items use "relative" links to images; for these images to display anywhere your feed is consumed, you must use "absolute" links. Here is an example of a relative link:

<img src="/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/0041_1.jpeg" alt="0041_1.jpeg" title="0041_1.jpeg" align="middle" width="400" height="602" border="0" />

To make this an absolute link, you should use the full site address:

<img src="http://mywebsite.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/0041_1.jpeg" alt="0041_1.jpeg" title="0041_1.jpeg" align="middle" width="400" height="602" border="0" />

Note that we added http://mywebsite.com/ to the beginning of the src address above.

Once you republish your content items using absolute links, the images should also start to appear in the FeedBurner feed when viewed in a browser or news aggregator.

We have reports from a small subset of users that their login sessions are terminated unexpectedly, e.g., when navigating from one page to another within FeedBurner. One common solution we have heard anecdotally is to disable Google Web Accelerator, should it be running on your system while you browse FeedBurner.

There is no guarantee that removing Google Web Accelerator will solve your problems, but it has seemed to be a workable solution for other account holders experiencing the same problem.

Unfortunately, we cannot remove your feed from sites which have resyndicated or redisplayed your content without your permission. The course of action available to you is to contact the site owners yourself and demand they remove your links or content wholesale. To look up the site's Internet Service Provider (ISP) information, you can visit http://www.dnsstuff.com/ and enter the domain in the DNS Lookup box on the upper right. On the results page, the domain's IP address will be a link. Click it and it will give you the information about the ISP the site is hosted on. At the bottom of that page is a link to have it show the email addresses in the information. You then should email the Abuse address (and/or any of the others) of the ISP.

Finally, send an email the ISP and give them the spam site address and any other links directly to your content on the site and request that they have it removed.

Unfortunately, certain network configurations, especially those that use firewalls or proxy servers to protect and segment their inbound and outbound requests, cause problems for some users who try to complete the subscription sign-up form we use with our Email Subscriptions feature. We are working to resolve this issue by being more lenient on our end with how we handle these security requests, but unfortunately there is no short-term solution or settings change we can recommend at this time to minimize the chances you will encounter this problem if you experience it currently.

While we have not ever been able to reliably recreate the problem, we have observations that a few things contribute to its occurrence: overzealous security suite software, a corporate proxy server, or possibly browser plugins like Google Web Accelerator. It can even be caused by a virus or spyware.

If you are able to sign up for a subscription successfully on a different computer — perhaps one on a different corporate or home office network — and the problem does not recur, the network you were using when you first encountered difficult with email signup is likely to have been the cause of the problem.

How do I join the FeedBurner Ad Network?

Publishers become eligible for the network based on a number of factors including subscriber base and advertiser demand for a specific content category. If your feed is eligible for the FeedBurner Ad Network, you will be alerted through the "Monetize" tab within the application. We are continually expanding the network and inviting more publishers to join. For more information, use our Commerical contact form.

I've joined up, but I don't see any ads yet in my feed or on my website. What's wrong?

Most likely, nothing is wrong! Ad inventory in FAN is distributed across all of our publishers according to targeting and pricing settings that are frequently tuned and there may be times during the day when no ad appears in your feed or in the ad code snippet you may have placed on your site for site ads. Have no fear: once you are in FAN and have approved at least one advertisement, it will eventually appear in your content.

How will I know that I have a campaign to approve?

We will alert you by email when there is a campaign to approve in your feeds. From this email, you simply click a link which takes you to the "Monetize" tab within the application.

How do I approve ads?

Proposed ad units are displayed on the "Monetize" tab of the application. From here, you can choose to accept or decline ads and review the gross CPM for each campaign.

What happens if I miss the 48-hour approval window?

Ad campaigns are impatient, but that's only because they want to make money for you. If you do not approve/decline an ad within 48 hours, the campaign will automatically approve itself and begin running in your feeds. If you miss the 2-day approval window and want to remove an ad from your feed, contact us.

When will I be paid?

Payments are made after 90 days and will continue every month moving forward, assuming you are regularly approving ads to run in your feed. We maintain a 90-day payment plan for all campaigns to allow time to receive payment from the advertiser.

What does "Estimated Payments" mean?

Publishers are paid based on the payment amount from the agency/advertiser. Many of our advertisers have 3rd party servers that help validate impressions and clicks. Occasionally, adjustments need to be made to reconcile reporting differences. While this amount is often marginal, we prefer to error on the side of caution and provide an estimate.

Where do I check for estimated earnings?

Once a campaign is up and running, you can monitor your estimate earning from the Ad Dashboard within the "Analyze" tab of the application.

Can I export my campaign results?

You can export campaign data in CSV or Excel file formats from the Ad Dashboard within the "Analyze" tab of the application.

Can I change the ad frequency?

Select "Ad Settings" from the "Monetize" tab in FeedBurner to make adjustments to frequency as well as the length of each post.

With the introduction of Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) and Firefox 2.0, these popular browsers incorporated a new approach to displaying feeds. Like FeedBurner's BrowserFriendly service, IE7 and Firefox present feeds (not just those from FeedBurner) as a webpage, with a listing of their content. IE7 offers options to subscribe to the feed using the browser's built-in feed reader; Firefox 2 offers several user-selected options for subscribing to feeds in various readers. These browsers' own display styling currently overrides any other feed styling options that might be applied to the feed, including FeedBurner's own BrowserFriendly.

FeedBurner's BrowserFriendly service provides publishers with an option to format feeds with a stylesheet and publisher-selected subscription buttons, or "chicklets," for various services. A feed that has BrowserFriendly's "Landing page renders as a webpage in all browsers" option checked will only display in Firefox 2 or IE7 with the FeedBurner-provided stylesheet if the feed is clicked on as a link on a live webpage. Typing the feed address directly in the browser bar or opening a feed linked in an email message, for example, will revert to the IE7/Firefox default stylesheet. Firefox, in particular, seems to cache feed stylesheets fairly aggressively, so you may not see the BrowserFriendly version of a feed even if you click to it from a link if you have already visited the feed previously.

One sure way to ensure you see the BrowserFriendly presentation is to add ?format=html to the end of your feed address. Here is an example:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/burnthisrss2?format=html

One other BrowserFriendly note: If FeedBurner encounters trouble processing your original source feed, it will try to return your original feed without the stylesheet instructions when requests come in for your FeedBurner feed. Not seeing your FeedBurner feed using the BrowserFriendly stylesheet, especially if you're using the ?format=html parameter shown above, is a sign you either a) don't have the "Landing page renders as a webpage in all browsers" checkbox checked in BrowserFriendly or b) there is an actual problem processing your feed. You should visit the Troubleshootize tab for your feed and view the FeedMedic report for possible details.

Yes. It can take 5-30 minutes for links to initially appear on the site, and 5-30 minutes after you publish any new items before the links appear below them as well. Your feed must also be visited by at least one browser, aggregator, or other known feed consuming application at least once per day in order for FeedFlare links to show up at all.

Are you using FeedBurner for your feed and enabling the Publicize > Password Protector service? Are you also displaying a Headline Animator image on your blog or another website?

If you answered both questions with a hearty "You bet I am, Hoss," your site visitors will be prompted to enter a password every time they visit a page that displays your Headline Animator. The Password Protector service protects this 'version' of your feed — the Headline Animator GIF image — just the same way it would protect direct access to your feed via its regular URL.

To avoid this scenario, you must disable Password Protector. Your Headline Animator image will then be available for anyone to view without being prompted for authentication (the same goes for your plain old feed, too).

If the feed you want to burn is password protected, you can just include the username and password right in the URL itself like this: http://user:password@www.domain.com/index.xml. So, for example, to access your Gmail inbox feed, you'd enter a source feed URL like https://user:password@gmail.google.com/gmail/feed/atom .

Just remember that FeedBurner feeds are not password protected unless you use the "Password Protector" service to "re-protect" your burned feed. (Look for it on the Publicize tab.)

If you use Google Webmaster Tools and expect to submit a feed as the source for a sitemap of your blog or website, you should use your site's original feed, and not your FeedBurner feed, for the sitemap to work properly. Here's why:

If you use our feed stats services to track feed item clickthroughs, FeedBurner rewrites your item URLs so that we can track the clicks before sending suscribers back to your website to view the original content. These links use the feedburner.com domain, of course. Sitemaps expect the original domain of the website in question to be found in the feed in order to function properly; these feedburner.com-rewritten permalinks will not work and then cause Webmaster Tools to report a sitemaps error. This error can be completely sidestepped by providing your original source feed instead. Webmaster Tools won't lack for any information or functionality as a result, and you can keep clickthrough tracking turned on in your FeedBurner feed.

One other point: if you have a site whose original feed redirects traffic to FeedBurner (for example, if you use Blogger redirection, or you use our FeedSmith plugin for WordPress), you will need to give Webmaster Tools the address of a feed that does not get redirected as a sitemap source.

For Blogger users, the following general feed URL format should always work:

http://mybloggerblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?redirect=false

For WordPress FeedSmith plugin users, use this URL format:

http://www.mywpblog.com/?feed=rss2

For all other platforms, other feed URL variations that are not redirected are what you need to provide.

FeedBurner won't work with an original feed hosted at a site that includes underscores in the top-level domain name . An example of such a domain would be:

my_blog_domain.blogspot.com

Although underscores are technically invalid characters in top-level domain names, almost all browsers, and many web services, support them. However, FeedBurner does not. This is due to a minor (but annoying!) limitation of the server-side application platform that FeedBurner uses. We expect this limitation to be removed in a forthcoming upgrade of that platform. In the meantime, however, the only workaround available to permit the use of FeedBurner with these sites is to remove the underscore from the domain name.

The Event Feed service is designed only for use with Google Calendar feeds or other event-service feeds (such as those provided by Upcoming.org). When used any other type of feed it has the highly undesirable side effect of hiding all of your posts from display in your FeedBurner feed until you deactivate the service.

To deactivate EventFeed:

Additional information about the Event Feed is available from the blog post announcing its release (along with quite a few other FeedBurner features from a "Hackathon" event.)

If you’ve noticed that your feed’s official “author” email address — the one that is listed with each <item> element in your feed — is using the oddball value of noemail@noemail.org, you’re probably wondering why that value appears and how you can change it to your own address. Here’s the answer.

Why it appears

If your Original Feed — the one you brought here to FeedBurner to burn and republish as a FeedBurner feed — is an Atom-formatted feed or some format other than RSS 2.0, you are probably using a service that converts it to RSS 2.0. Services that may convert your feed to RSS 2.0 include SmartCast, Convert Format, and SmartFeed. RSS 2.0 requires an <author> element for each <item> that contains an email address, and your original feed had no equivalent element for us to transcode. Thus, we substitute the valid, but unusable, noemail@noemail.org address.

How to use your desired address instead

Apply the SmartCast service to your feed (if it is not already active), and be certain to provide your desired value for “Author email address” in the form that SmartCast displays when you activate or edit this service’s settings. FeedBurner will use this SmartCast-provided email address in all <author> elements on the page. It will also permanently convert your feed to RSS 2.0 format and convert your feed into a podcast-ready format. This should have no detrimental effect on feeds that were never intended to be podcasts, although FeedBurner may added iTunes-related tags and other blurb or two of information that your feed doesn’t really need to provide if it’s not a podcast.

Another question: Shouldn’t you just use my FeedBurner account’s email address here so I don’t have to use SmartCast if I don’t want to?

Yes, and that’s coming after we do some additional work here, there, and elsewhere to make it possible and have it remain as an optional setting.

PithHelmet is "an extended site preferences and ad blocking plugin for Apple's Safari browser," written by Mike Solomon.

Under certain conditions, PithHelmet may block FeedBurner's stylesheets, rendering our application a little…funny-looking, if not downright unusable.

If you're using Safari with PithHelmet, you may need to disable blocking for FeedBurner.com in order to take full advantage of our website. To do so, please follow these steps:

The issue is that requests for the feed you have provided FeedBurner to check for updates (your "Original Feed") are being redirected back to your FeedBurner URL. This creates an infinite loop: your original feed redirects to FeedBurner, FeedBurner checks your original feed for updates, which redirects to the FeedBurner feed, and so on. FeedBurner catches and halts this looping process, but your FeedBurner feed will not update until you end the loop that starts with your server's own redirection.

The very first post in the (lengthy) FeedBurner Forums topic below provides a more complete explanation of the issue and how to repair it:

http://forums.feedburner.com/viewtopic.php?t=3

Feeds can go bad when they start hanging around with the wrong group of kids.

Actually, the most common cause of feed problems is the content that you post. A lot of folks like to use Microsoft Word (or other word processors, we just know this one has caused us a lot of headaches) to write up their blog posts. When they do, sometimes these word processors can sneak in characters that are very difficult to render in XML. The most likely culprit is the dreaded Smart Quote, especially it you are putting quotations in your feed posts. Also, Word (we think) likes to put in special tags for formatting paragraphs, as well as address information. We don't always know where these things come from, we just know that when they are introduced, they cause problems.

So how do I keep that junk from coming into my feed/blog?

Our best advice is to compose your postings in a straight text editor, like Notepad on Windows, or TextEdit on the Mac. You can get away with putting HTML tags in your posts, as most blogging engines correctly format those tags for placement inside a feed.

Can FeedBurner notify me if and when my source feed goes bad?

Yes indeed. Check out FeedBulletin; it's a feed we publish that contains error notifications (from our free FeedMedic health-monitoring service) about anything troublesome we catch with your source feed. You can even password-protect FeedBulletin communications.

Visit your FeedBurner My Account page to learn more and to find the address for your personal FeedBulletin feed.

If your feed has these XML tags in it:

Code:

<o:p>(some text)</o:p>

It is very likely that your feed will be considered invalid by FeedBurner, Feed Validator, and possibly many other places to which you want your feed properly distributed. The result is that FeedBurner will stop updating its version of your feed until the validation problem is repaired.

The <o:p> tag is usually introduced by a copy-paste of original text from Microsoft Word or another Office application; this tag originates in a Microsoft XML "namespace," or definition of a custom set of tags used for XML markup. The best way to avoid this problem is to avoid composing and copying content from Word into your blogging tools. If you still want to use content found in Office applications, a common trick for removing extraneous code is to "clean" copied text by pasting it into a plain text editor, such as Notepad (Windows) or TextEdit (Mac) and the copying the newly cleaned text before pasting it into your blogging application.

In general, using word processing applications to compose blog posts can lead to unexpected results (such as this one). We recommend that you compose new posts in a text editor recommended or provided by your blog platform publisher only.

This issue occurs when you use FeedBurner's stats tracking capabilities to track clickthroughs back to your site; this clickthrough option is selectable as a checkbox on the Analyze > FeedBurner Stats PRO setup form.

If the FeedBurner-created clickthrough links back to your original content items do not work, one highly likely cause for trouble is that there are <guid> elements associated with each item in the feed, and these elements are missing a critical attribute:

isPermaLink="false"

If this attribute is missing, the <guid> element's own content is used as a permalink back to the original item, and this link almost never works. In most cases, the element value isn't a proper web address, so the redirected link fails.

By adding the isPermaLink attribute to your original feed's XML template as shown, FeedBurner will know to look in the <link> element for the URL to rewrite and ignore the <guid>.

If you use Feed Validator to check up on your feed's formatting and validity, you may have seen this error message:



So, what should you do about it?

The short answer is: nothing. Although the Atom (which is one flavor of feed, like RSS) specification has been updated, all of the major services and applications -- including FeedBurner -- still understand the older version.

Better yet, by using FeedBurner, you can make sure that your feed is always delivered in the most appropriate, compatible format to your readers. Our SmartFeed service automatically decides which format is best for the reader requesting your feed, so you don't have to worry about sending down obsolete formats.

There are two potential causes of a podcast feed not working: