Feedburner is splendid, despite the intermittent session timeouts on its website. Yet I was bit apprehensive about it, the fear of handing over “the control” to them. However, after moving this blog from JRoller to my own hosting I regretted this hesitation. This change shouldn’t have made any difference to this blog’s feed subscribers.

When I switched to WordPress, I learnt that it provides many flavours of feed including RSS, TDF and Atom. It is awesome but confusing, because you never get to know, exactly how many people are actually reading your blog through newsreaders.

Recently, it occurred to me that somebody must have thought about it before and I just Googled and quite easily stumbled upon this amazing plugin from OrderedList. It’s called the “Feedburner Plugin” and it simply helps you divert all your WordPress feed subscribers to your Feedburner feed. Yes, it really routes all of them, whether they use your blog’s Atom or RSS feed; even the comment feeds could be routed this way. The best part of all this, your readers do not even get to know about this. Steve, you rock!

FeedBurnerFor the blog owner it is a myriad of benefits. Not only do you get to keep track of your readers, proudly flash the count (even if it’s peanuts) and analyze the feed usage, you get benefit of all the Feedburner featurettes, like the “Feed Via Email” feature that probably ends the need for separate service like FeedBlitz. Feedburner now has an interesting lineup of features under one roof, there are BuzzBoost & Headline Animator that lest you display latest blog headlines on any other site, Pinging service, feed analysis and so on. You may password protect your feed and can even make money from it. There are host of others, including “paid” ones like SmartCast for podcasters. Fabulous!

Look for the Feed Icon in the newly added Subscribe section below, that’s the fruit of this labour apart from this post.