Using FeedBurner To Syndicate Your Content

I've just started to explore how this could potentially be a very good thing for my forums. Since you can track subscriptions, down to individual threads, and syndicate the content, this makes it so much better than the stock external.php RSS. I'm actually surprised that no one has brought this up yet.

Right now I have links in all my individual forums for RSS feeds using a rewrite rule on external.php. I'm looking into replacing some of these with feedburner feeds (I have actually have things setup to work like feeds.mydomain.com/forum(feed)name)

Anyone else out there using FeedBurner? Are you using it for all of your individual forums or just some select ones?

Just want to second this question. I'm also want to use feedburner for my vbulletin.

No one?

I'd like to do this too... I would think that vbseo could do it... need to redirect external to feedburner, BUT, we also need to still allow feedburner to get to external in order to get the feeds, right?

Take a look at my forums (CPF) for how I set this up. I had to manually burn a feed for each forum in feedburner. You don't 'redirect' to feedburner, you burn your feed (external.php) in feedburner and replace the rss links in vbulletin with feedburner.

Thanks tavenger... I already figured out what to do... but it will take a while to create 250 feeds... ugh. The nice thing those is I can force in aggregate feeds where I want them... like for summary forums. The standard external.php doesn't do that. I wish they would let you pass a url variable to feedburner... would make it a lot easier. I have it working, now just need to create more feeds at feedburner.

I plan to write this up and post it at vbulletin.org as a manual hack.

Do you know if there is a way to set any of the Feedburner settings for ALL your feeds, or do you have to do that one by one? Like, setting it to summary mode for example. I hope there is a way to set those things aross the board. Its probably wishful thinking.

Now for the question of the year relative to SEO. How in the world do you get a 100:1 ratio of non-registered visitors to registered visitors. I would kill for that kind of ratio!

I added a hack at vbulletin.org on this... pretty crude, but hopefully people will be able to follow it... Replacment of External.php with FeedBurner - vBulletin.org Forum

Yeh, there isn't a simple way to automatically submit everything or change settings in feedburner in bulk. There is a way to do it using their API, but I didn't get into fooling around with it that much.

Good writeup though!

Code:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner
RewriteRule ^external\.php$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/yoururl [R,L]

It works for me, but turns every RSS feed on the site into a giant FeedBurner URL since I have FeedBurner configured to pull http://mysite.com/external.php?type=rss2

Do you know any way I can make sure RSS2 is used in that rewrite?

*IT does work. Just not perfectly. But you'll have a giant Google Feed with FeedBurner.