Feedburner - use for a WordPress blog or not?
There are good reasons to use Feedburner - and, depending on your circumstances, sometimes reasons not.
Feedburner republishes (burns, as they have it) a RSS feed in more powerful and useful form - it’s the same basic content, with added extras.
Reasons For
Statistics/Metrics
It’s the quickest way to find out how many subscriptions a given RSS feed has. Note that this isn’t the same as unique users. WordPress plugins do exist for this purpose, and if that’s all you want, then no reason not to use them.
Ease of Subscription
Ever since the days when anyone clicking on an orange feed icon was confronted with a browser full of XML, this has been a problem for RSS uptake. Readers can subscribe to your feed via the major players, Bloglines, Newsgator etc with a couple of clicks.
Ping Service
Feedburner will poll a feed every 30 minutes by default, or you can configure things to update instantly on posting - it does seem to work a little more accurately than some of its competitors.
Monetization
For the heavy-duty blogger, there are ads in RSS courtesy of Feedburner. You do require a significant level of traffic and subscribers to be included into the scheme.
Extras
Lots of extra features, that may be no more than useless widgets cluttering the sidebar or absolutely vital tools, depending on your blog.
Reasons Against
URLs
One of the strengths of Feedburner - the portability advantage of using a feedburner.com URL - can be a weakness in some programming situations.
Privacy
You might not want Feedburner selling off the traffic stats you provide - or these being used by whichever large corporation snaps them up. Because, ultimately
Reliance
You are reliant on FeedBurner continuing to offer the service as it now stands…
Any other arguments, for or against..?
assur — May 21, 2007 @ 2:51 pm
Can be problems when sites change ownership.
There doesn’t seem to be a way of pushing a feed off an account, so unless seller cooperates somehow can be stuck.
Jack — May 21, 2007 @ 3:55 pm
for: How about the bandwidth break that we get for having feedburner take care of the feed! If you have enough subscribers, this is very significant.