For as long as I can remember FeedBurner has been the preferred method for hosting and managing your RSS feeds, especially when it came to WordPress blogs. At one point you could see the FeedBurner FeedSmith WordPress plugin on many blogs listed as an “essential plugin.” Like everyone else I went along with it because it was simple and had one of my most coveted features - reader stats. In the last few months I have seen a big problem with using the Feedburner service to manage your site’s RSS feed, it’s slow.
For awhile I thought it was just my feed, but the other day Loic Le Meur (@loic) twittered that his feeds weren’t being updated quick enough either and received a bunch of responses along the same lines. At one point he mentioned a 24 hour delay in post delivery.
To me this is unacceptable and it sets off the “never rely on web services” fear that gets triggered from time to time. Some may think I’m acting irrational but I think you should rely on yourself and never expect a web app to always be there or perform properly.
So, if you’re like me and looking to toss FeedBurner out the door for a younger and cooler option, what should we do? Well, I’m sure there is another service around somewhere that does the same thing but I don’t want to have to rely on them either. How about we self host our own RSS feeds? For those of you shocked at the thought, don’t be. We did it before FeedBurner, we can do it now and we can do it after FeedBurner is gone.
Now I’m sure you’re asking “but Michael, what about all those features?” FeedBurner offers a lot of tools that many people have gotten used to, so lets see if we can replicate these in a self-hosted situation.
What’s the most popular feature in FeedBurner? Well, to me, it has to be the ability to track how many subscribers you have. So the first thing we need to do is figure out how we’re going to track all those readers we have.
FeedStats is a plug-in that does just what we’re looking for, it tracks how many RSS subscribers you have. Nothing more, nothing less. It works across the multiple types of feeds your blog may have, such as RSS and Atom, and gives you an exact number of how many people are paying attention to your blog.
One thing you’ll notice is that it’s not as pretty. There are no super fancy graphs or pie charts. Personally, I’m not looking for pretty, I just need something that works and will tell me how many people are interested in what I’m writing and FeedStats handles this task with ease.
Now a lot of people use the email delivery feature in FeedBurner to let their readers get the latest blog updates right in their inbox. So how are we going to replicate this?
If you have a fairly small site or a powerful enough server, I would recommend Subscribe2. The plugin allows you to collect your readers’ email addresses and automatically update them when you write a new post. You can also use their email addresses to send out a newsletter, or any type of update, if need be.
The only problem with Subscribe2 is that if you have a very large site, or don’t know what you’re doing, you may get in trouble with your web host. Sending out a lot of emails at once from your server can put strain on the server and also come across as spam to your host which may get your account suspended. Please, I repeat please, read the Subscribe2 FAQ and all included instructions to avoid getting in trouble. If you can’t find everything you need there, or are unsure about something, talk to your web host before using the plugin.*
Aweber is a tool mostly used by businesses to send out newsletters to their clients/customers. The typical use is to put a form on a web site and collect names and email addresses, but Aweber has recently added features that let you manage your RSS-to-email needs.
Unlike the others, Aweber isn’t free and it’s not a self-hosted service. If your site is large enough you may want to consider using Aweber though to keep the strain off your server. As I said, Aweber isn’t self-hosted, but because they have been around for so long and a pretty good reputation, I have much more faith in Aweber than I do in FeedBurner to get your messages delivered.
For the average user FeedBurner is more than sufficient, but for the paranoid/geeky out there a self-hosted solution lets us sleep a bit easier. Plus it’s more fun.
*Disclaimer: I am not responsible for anything that happens if you use these tools. It’s all on you, do your research.
Disclosure: The Aweber.com links are affiliate links.