FeedBurner, burn your RSS feeds and spread the Net

I tried, tested and used Feedburner, a free service to diffuse contents through feeds RSS (the most widespread) or of other kinds such as Podcast. Actually I was positively impressed by the automation level Feedburner offers with regard to operations usually made by hand such as signaling updates to pinging services, tools to subscribe to feeds with different kinds of aggregators through the web site, feed circulation monitoring and much more.

The only drawback (if I may say so) is the great number of options and features which might make the tool distractive to non–experts. I will highlight the main features as clearly as possible, granted that, in order to use Feedburner, it is necessary to have one’s own contents at disposal in a RSS feed. Here follows the scheme to integrate Feedburner with your feed

1. Insert you feed in FeedBurner
2. Feedburner uses your feed as a source and generates a new one with its own address (http://www.feedburner/feed_name)
3. All the operations are executed on the generated feed, which will be the new official feed (yours stands as data source). Once it has absorbed your feed to generate its own, you can work on it with the powerful tools at disposal.

Feedburner automates following procedures:

• Subscriptions to the feed via web with various aggregators
• Content updates signaling to pinging services
• Technical compliance of feed to the greatest possible number of aggregators
• Monitoring of bot controls to the feed (engines check to verify any upgrade)

Subscription

Subscription to the service is easy and immediate. You just need to insert the first feed in addition to username, password and e-mail address in order to be operative. In the following form, you’ll find the main interface containing all the features grouped under five labels:
    A. Analyze | monitoring on contents diffusion
    B. Optimize | various technical settings of your feed
    C. Publicize | feed diffusion automation through various tools
    D. Monetize | feed integration with AdSense for Feed and Amazon
    E. Troubleshootize | support Let’s examine the different tools in utilization order, namely, after inserting the feed, let us follow these steps;

Optimize

The items 'Your feed' and 'XML source' are used to personalize the source code which generates your feed’s page on Feedburner, whose URL is http://www.feedburner/. Then we find:

1. BrowserFriendly sets graphical themes of the page and custom information as title and description.
2. SmartCast automatically generates a feed podcast, compliant with iTunes
3. SmartFeed transforms your feed in a format compliant with most widespread aggregators
4. FeedFlare integrates in each post a few tools users can interact with, such as Technorati, del.icio.us and other ones.
5. Link Splicer should you have a service for social book-marking, you can insert your links in the feed
6. Photo Splicer the same for pictures
7. Geotag Your Feed input latitude and longitude and you’ll have your feed associated to a point in the globe.
8. Feed Image Burner sets an icon for feeds which is then displayed in various RSS readers.
9. Convert Format Burner here you set your feed page content-type. As default it is the same of your source feed
10. Summary Burner You can also customize your Feedburner page with links to your site

Once set the main options, we can go on to the setting of automatic feed distribution through publicize tab.

Publicize

1. BuzzBoost generates an html code showing last feed posts which can be inserted in any web page
2. Headline Animator same purpose but with a tiny animated graphical block. Headlines are displayed scrolling
3. PingShot setting of automatic notice to RSS web aggregators (technorati, myYahoo, etc) with regard to new contents on your feed
4. Email Subscriptions generates an e-mail notice system to your site users in case of new contents
5. FeedCount small graphical counter displaying your feed’s spread on the net
6. Awareness API gives access to Feedburner data for custom applications in your site
7. Chicklet Chooser generates the code necessary to let users subscribe to the feed directly on your site, and with lots of aggregators.
8. Password Protector should you need to restrict access to your feed
9. Creative Commons includes Creative Commons licenses for your feed

After setting diffusion parameters, you can include in your system affiliation programs

Monetize

Amazon or Adsense too can be included in your site. In order to include Amazon, you just need to input the affiliation code, while for Adsense a brand new system in beta test called “Adsense for Feed “is available. If the readers of your feed are more than 100, you can subscribe as beta tester. The system goes to it on its own, and it is sufficient consulting statistics from time to time to check feed diffusion and make adjustments when needed.

Analyze

1. Feed Circulation shows the number of subscribers to your feed
2. Readership monitoring on web aggregators which took from your feed, subscriptions via web, aggregator type, any subscription made through browser, what engines have checked for updates, etc.
3. Item Stats blog statistics

Feedburner address: http://www.feedburner.com