As part of my goal to get more readers to this site I’ve finally setup an account with FeedBurner. Unfortunately; since I did not have FeedBurner setup before, I am left wondering what to do with all of my current subscribers. I can’t ask them to delete the old feed from their feed readers because nobody would actually do it. Instead, I’ll just redirect from my old feed to my new feed using Apache!
If you have control of your server it’s as simple as setting a redirect from your current feed to your Feedburner feed. Here’s how:
- Point Feedburner to /wordpress/wp-rss2.php NOT to /feed. If you point FeedBurner to /feed then you’ll enter a recursive loop of redirects. Whoops!
- Look for a file called .htaccess at the root directory for your site. It is a hidden file so you have to pass the ‘-a’ flag to ls to see it. I have no clue how to see hidden files on windows.
- Most likely you can place the following line at the very top of your .htaccess file. You want this redirect to happen before anything else in the file. In my case, I actually had a redirect from anything www to no www, so I wanted that to happen BEFORE redirecting to the feed, so I placed this redirect below the www redirect:
Redirect /feed http://feeds.feedburner.com/benjamingolubThat will do a 302 (temporary) redirect from my Wordpress feed to my FeedBurner feed.
Any software that’s any good will follow that redirect and grab entries from FeedBurner without any user intervention. Now I can collect some statistics!
Tags: apache, feedburner, rss