I don’t normally point twice to the same website in one day but Dave has some great points about how to create a FeedBurner competitor. I personally would be happy if it was either built into my blog application or was a plugin. What they are doing over their is not rocket science.
To this day I do not understand why people out-source the delivery of their RSS feed to FeedBurner when nearly all blog applications have a built in RSS feed. If people want to read my content they can visit this website if they want to subscribe to the RSS feed they do so like everyone else with a aggreator. In fact I would discourage people from reading my RSS feed online through there browser that defeats the purpose of site branding. [Scripting News]
Subscriber numbers, email delivery baked in, autopinging, javascript add ons after each item in my feed (FeedFlare, they call it, things like “Number of Inbound links to this item via Technorati”, one-click subscribe from the feed landing page, browser friendly landing page instead of XML code.
What does this line mean? “In fact I would discourage people from reading my RSS feed online through there browser that defeats the purpose of site branding.” Does that mean that you don’t want me to read your feed in an aggregator? Or do you just do partial feeds and asume that your readers are clicking through in a desktop reader that displays your branding? Yes, RSS de-emphasizes site branding – it’s a trade off for publishers in terms of the relationships they can build with a larger number of subscribers than would visit their pages proper, manually, on a regular basis.
I don’t know why people wouldn’t use Feedburner – I’m a huge advocate of it. The possibility of the service going down is conceivalbe, but redirects to a Fox page is not. Besides, your aggregator does save the HTML URL of the feeds you’re subscribed to. No big deal.