Library clips

This is a follow on from my last post about removing my native feed, and just promoting my Feedburner feed.

I have removed references to my native feeds in my blog template…ie. removed the auto-subscribe code, and removed the code for subscription icons on the sidebar.

All I have now is the Feedburner icon for people to subscribe, and if people use a bookmarklet (auto-subscribe) or auto-detection service, then it will detect only my Feedburner feed.

Now as I understand it, even though I have removed my natives feeds, I have not deleted them from the server…well, I can’t as I have a blog host.
The thing is that I don’t want to delete (from the blog host server) the native feed that my Feedburner feed is based on as Feedburner needs to check this feed URL inorder to do its work.

So, new subscribers to my blog won’t know my native feed, when they go to my site all they see is the Feedburner feed, and if they auto-subscribe all they will get is the Feedburner feed…this is perfect.

In my last blog post I asked current subscribers to my native feed to move to the Feedburner feed, this was about 5 days ago.
Now, if people stay subscribed to this native feed they will still see the latest contents, because the native feed still exists, it’s just I don’t promote it anymore…it’s a secret.
So even if I ask people to move to my Feedburner feed, they may not be bothered and not do this as they will find the native feed is being updated, so why bother move to the Feedburner feed.

So it is hard to get people to move to your Feedburner feed if your native feed still works, as they don’t have an incentive as the native feed still works…the only way they would move is if my native feed stopped updating, but I can’t do this as I need it operating for Feedburner to check it.

Those of you lurking out there about to start a blog, burn your feed, then remove references to your native feed (both in the sidebar and autosubscribe…and replace this by promoting your Feedburner feed)…this way when you start blogging no-one will ever know the URL of your native feed.

When I started my blog, I burnt a Feedburner feed, but I didn’t remove references to my native feeds, so now I have heaps of subscribers in each feed…the only way I can get current subscribers to my Feedburner feed is by asking them (since my native feeds still work they don’t have a great push to move over).

As I said before I won’t ask my blog host to delete my native feed from their server as I need this to operate my Feedburner feed…this is a pity, because if my native feed stopped working then people would have to move over.

There are re-direct ways around this, but you need control of the server your blog is on…see Tip #3: Redirect requests for your old feed.

[ADDED: at the moment my Feedburner chicklet states that I have 410 readers.
My 3 other native feeds have over 200 subscribers just on the Bloglines RSS Reader…so I wonder how many other subscribers I have on other RSS Readers (this is hard to find out as, from my findings, only Rojo and Bloglines note how many subscribers to a feed). Even if they did, I’m not exactly going to check 100’s of RSS Readers for my subscriber numbers…and what about other services that read feeds not using RSS Readers, like RSS to email, RSS to IM, Browser RSS Readers, etc…
I noticed I have a lot of Pluck subscribers to my Feedburner feed, so I wonder how many I have for my native feeds…unfortunately they don’t show subscriber numbers for each feed.]