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Resyndicate your Blog with FeedBurner RSS Server

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Feedburner is a great webmaster's resource for resyndicating blogs or other xml or atom sources, that was recently cited by Red Herring as one of their top 100 new technology companies

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My First Feeds

My explorations of Amazon.com brought me to: The Amazon.com Syndicated Content page (since deceased) which I suppose was my first glimpse of "Web 2.0" It looked like I would have to be an expert Perl programmer, study Amazon Web Services, and operate a server just to get started.

Then I found Feedburner. I could dress those plain amazon XML files, make them more browser-friendly, easier to subscribe to, and to a limited extent insert my own Amazon associate ID. Before long this developed into a very popular page.

Limitations

Unfortunately, the Amazon Syndicated Content link above is seriously flawed. Although it is very broad in its coverage, it lacks specificity. Shoppers aren't that interested in knowing what are the most popular items in a broad category -- they want to find what they are looking for.

Amazon Hacks

Chapter 6 "Amazon Web Services" shows how to configure a URL for and Amazon.com RSS feed, but Amazon has changed their site a lot since this book came out, and you might want to wait for the second edition.

Using Feedburner

I have a blog The Whole Ed Cata-blog, which really lacks any particular focus, although it has gravitated toward SEO (Search Engine Optimization) issues lately. Google (and other search engines) hate this kind of site. They prefer single-topic sites where their limited artificial intelligence can figure out what the site is "about."

Anyway, that explains why I prefer posting to Squidoo over "normal" blogspace, so now I will get back on topic and show how to resyndicate a blog. Just paste the target feed's URL into the Feedburner form -- in this case:

http://wholeed.blogspot.com/atom.xml

Before long, Feed burner returns something like:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/TheWholeEdCata-blog

Now all you need to do is plug that URL into A Squidoo RSS module to get something like the following:

My Resyndicated Blog

The Whole Ed Cata-Blog

The RSS module doesn't automagically put a link to the original feed here, but since I want people to see the Feedburner copy of the site, I added the link above.

I just want to give links to the headlines, so I pick a large number (like 20), "no exerpt," "1 day," and "yes." You can choose differently, of course, and the effects are pretty self-explanatory, and easily experimented with.

Recent Feed Medic Results

That's it! Feedburner has a lot of "bells and whistles" you can add to your feed (which is probably the main reason you'd want to use the service) but I will leave the explanation of those to the Feedburner support forums.

Here is a recent excerpt from my Feedburner diagnostics page.

LinkBuddies Rocks!

No. Really. It does.

Find Out why I Like LinkBuddies

The Whole Ed Cata-Blog

Subscribe to The Whole Ed Cata-Blog

I've never quite been sure what distinguishes a blog from a regular webpage. Timeliness seems to have something to do with it, but that doesn't seem to be a hard and fast rule.

Anyway, here are some of the things I've been working on lately...