I think FeedBurner is one of the coolest sites out there today, and I wanted to share how I use it with the world. My life is a lot easier because of it - I can manage my feeds in ways I couldn’t even imagine before. I love it. Here’s why:

I was able to move the location of my feeds from one domain to another, one directory to another and one web host to another without any interruption in service or problems accesing my feed items. Now that’s cool! Portability, here I come to enthuse about you!

I’ve been able to splice my feed with my del.icio.us bookmarks, and that’s been wonderful! Not only is that a “nice to have” item for me, but it’s saving me lots of time! You see, I put out the ComeAcross Podcast. It’s a quick summary of interesting stuff I stumble on. Well, along with it, I provide the audience with a collection of detailed info about the things I mention in the show. For the 1st three episodes, I did it with zipped PDFs - but you know, publishers aren’t too keen on reproduction of their content - so I decided to drop that before one of their lawyers contacted me…

Next I switched to coding a summary of links to each of the articles or websites I talked about, but that was getting bothersome. I’d have to copy shortcuts to those websites to my hard drive when I found the articles, then when I put the show together, open them up again, and write the summary in Dreamweaver. Well, I thought, why couldn’t I do away with that step? When I discovered the Link Splicing feature in FeedBurner and realized I could use that to distribute the links, I jumped up for joy! Yes, less headaches! Now for my next show, my 8th, I’ll simply tell my subscribers to check my FeedBurner feed for the del.icio.us links mentioned in the podcast! Cool!

Here’s more good news about Link Splicing: with the help of support folks at FeedBurner, I was pointed to a hack which allows me to use only specially tagged items from my del.icio.us bookmarks for my feeds. So, for example, I use items tagged Dignoscentia on my three Dignoscentia feeds (The Dignoscentia Blog, Dignoscentia Bible Podcast and Dignoscentia Podcast Biblic). And I use only items tagged for the podcast on the ComeAcross Podcast feed.

Of course, I love the FeedFlare option as well. Boy, does that come in handy to make it easy for people to add various blog or podcast items to del.icio.us! That’s like a guaranteed traffic increase right there! The easier it is for people to share things with others, the easier it is for me to get my content out there!

I am enamored with BuzzBoost and Headline Animator. I use them to promote my content. I use the Chicklet Chooser a lot. I post the Feed icon on all my sites to let visitors know they can browse my feeds directly. And it’s also on the FeedBurner Support Forums that I found out how to advertise my feed to crawlers by posting the links in my code. Check out the source code for my home page to see what I mean. All of my feeds are present there! Cool!

The stats are really, really cool! FeedBurner breaks down my readers by app used to access the feed, and also gives me stats about which feed items get accessed. Last, but not least, I love PingShot! It’s instant gratification. Everyone (about 10 or so of the biggest blog or podcast locators) knows about a new item on my feeds as soon as I ping FeedBurner.

The FeedBurner support folks are the quickest in the biz, and for a free service, that’s saying a LOT. They’re right on the money, they’re friendly, and they understand English! They’re not outsourced! Yes!

Thanks, FeedBurner, for making my geeky life easier and more fun!

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