Best WordPress Modifications: Feedburner
Feedburner is a great tool for making the most of your RSS feeds. A free service now owned by Google, Feedburner extends the functionality of your standard RSS feeds in multiple ways:
Metrics – The basic WordPress RSS feed doesn’t give you much of an idea about your readers. Burning your feeds allows you access to important metrics such as how many people are subscribed to your feed, where they are located, how many unsubscribed readers are accessing your content, etc.
Social Media -Under the optimize tab in your Feedburner account exists an option for FeedFlare–a super easy way to add interactivity to your RSS and email subscriptions. While the options are somewhat limited, the big names such as Digg, Facebook, del.icio.us and a few others are there and easy to use.
Email – Feedburner makes it easy to deliver your content through email. Under the publicize tab in your account settings, simply enable email subscriptions and copy and paste the snippet of code into your template. Your emails will be delivered at a specified time every day that you post something on your blog. While you don’t have the same degree of control as might be provided by an HTML email service such as MailChimp, your content gets distributed without any work on your part.
Future Modifications – Feedburner routes your feeds through their own servers to provide the benefits described above. While this may be a drawback to some because your feed address is now of the form feeds.feedburner.com/FlintHillsDesignSnippets instead of something associated with your domain like flinthillsdesign.com/blog/feed, the upshot is that now if your blog moves or your feed address changes, your subscribed readers will not be lost!
