the candler blog

An Update on Feeds

Yesterday, after months (years, really) of deliberation, I turned off the FeedBurner feed for the candler blog and redirected it to FeedPress. If you’re a subscriber to the candler blog, you shouldn’t notice any difference, but if you’re experiencing any issues you can resubscribe with this link.

FeedPress offers a few advantages over FeedBurner, but there are two main reasons I’ve been wanting to make the switch:

  1. FeedBurner is abandonware. It’s no longer a question of if Google will kill it, but when.
  2. Google creeps me out. The more data I can take off of their servers the better. (I’ve got a long way to go still, but every little bit counts.)

And so I took the plunge yesterday. FeedPress’s best feature is that, unlike FeedBurner, it isn’t intended as a replacement for your RSS feed, but rather as a sort of proxy that enhances a given feed. If I understand correctly (and I probably don’t) the feed I host here on my server redirects to FeedPress, which in turn redirects back to my original feed. In other words: my feed is my feed. Always.

In that same vein, FeedPress recently introduced Dropbox integration. Once a day, a .txt document with the day’s subscription numbers gets dropped into a folder in my Dropbox account. I love that in order to check the numbers, I don’t even need to log into FeedPress; they just plop a report onto my hard drive.

If RSS isn’t your thing, then you can subscribe to the Twitter and App.net accounts of the candler blog. These feeds will only provide links and headlines. Posts are sent to Twitter via IFTTT and to App.net via PourOver. Both of those accounts use links from a custom RSS feed generated through Yahoo! Pipes which I wrote about in detail last year, though I had to tweak a few settings after switching to FeedPress.

I welcome any feedback about these feeds. Here they are once more:

As ever, thanks for reading.