Panasonic Youth

Multiple feeds suck - switching to Feedburner and one feed

rss sucks As has been written about many times before, having a bunch of different feeds with different names and formats is horrible from a usability standpoint and just dumb to begin with. Even I find it confusing when I try to add a blog to Bloglines and I’m confronted with five different options, and I’m a big geek.

So I setup a Feedburner account, and with the help of a nice Wordpress plugin all the old feeds should redirect to that. Then a quick edit to the header template reduced the auto-discovery feeds to just the Feedburner one. Feedburner’s SmartFeed can take care of the multiple formats, and now there is just one link to worry about for subscribing.

(side note: Bloglines uses its own database of known feeds for a site, which is why if you try to add my site, for example, you still get five or six feeds. Apparently they will die over time as the redirects work.)