Feed Burner - Eating Your Own Dog Food
24 Aug 2006One of the interesting things I’ve found about blogging is the wealth of services that revolve around blogging. One of the more interesting services is FeedBurner. FeedBurner basically takes an RSS feed and enhances it. What’s an RSS feed you ask? Simply stated, it is a standard format for distributing syndicated content. Still confused? Look at this way, whenever a new entry is added to this blog, my code generates a snippet of XML that is easily consumed by other services. What other services, you ask? A news aggregator like BlogLines (my favorite news reader) for instance can collect these feeds and present them in a consolidated format, but I digress.
FeedBurner can take an RSS feed and decorate with extra features. For instance, if you look at the bottom of this article you’ll see links to Email this feed, Digg it, add it to del.icio.us and more. I didn’t add those, FeedBurner did. Pretty cool and it didn’t cost me anything.
FeedBurner also keeps tracks of the number of subscribers and click-throughs. It’s really an incredible service and it’s free. In fact, if you are viewing this article on my blog’s main page, you’re looking at a FeedBurner version. Yep, I’m consuming my own feed (eating my own dog food so to speak). I’ll eventually move away from this for other reasons but you have to admit, its an interesting and useful service.