Blogger Magic - The FeedBurner Redirected Feed

One of the neatest bits of magic in the Blogger trickbox is the FeedBurner (external) feed redirection. A redirected FeedBurner feed requires 2 steps.

1. Setup a FeedBurner feed, sourced from the blog native feed.
2. In Settings - Site Feed, redirect the blog feed to the FeedBurner feed.

The native feed from this blog, "blogging.nitecruzr.net", is

blogging.nitecruzr.net/feeds/posts/default

That's how my blog started out (after I republished the blog to the custom domain URL). I setup a FeedBurner feed

feeds.feedburner.com/Nitecruzr-Blogging

after this blog had been long in existence.

Normally, when you change a URL, half the work involved in the change is going around to all of your readers and saying

Hey, check out my new blog feed, "feeds.feedburner.com/Nitecruzr-Blogging

Informing your readers is the complicated part of this change.

In this case, I spent no time doing that. Many of my readers don't even know about "feeds.feedburner.com/Nitecruzr-Blogging", they think that I'm still publishing "blogging.nitecruzr.net/feeds/posts/default" (which I am, actually).

All that I had to do was change one setting in my blog. In Settings - Site Feed, I set "Post Feed Redirect URL". Blogger took care of the rest.

A post feed redirect is the simple part of this change.

Let's look at a redirected feed, using an excerpted HTTP trace.

Sending request:

GET /feeds/posts/default HTTP/1.1
Host: blogging.nitecruzr.net
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.15) Gecko/2009101601 Firefox/3.0.15
Referer: http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html
Connection: close

• Finding host IP address...
• Host IP address = 74.125.53.121
• Finding TCP protocol...
• Binding to local socket...
• Connecting to host...
• Sending request...
• Waiting for response...
Receiving Header:
HTTP/1.1·302·Moved·Temporarily(CR)(LF)
X-Frame-Options:·ALLOWALL(CR)(LF)
Location:·http://feeds.feedburner.com/Nitecruzr-Blogging(CR)(LF)

...

Sending request:

GET /Nitecruzr-Blogging HTTP/1.1
Host: feeds.feedburner.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.15) Gecko/2009101601 Firefox/3.0.15
Referer: http://www.rexswain.com/httpview.html
Connection: close

• Finding host IP address...
• Host IP address = 74.125.155.133
• Finding TCP protocol...
• Binding to local socket...
• Connecting to host...
• Sending request...
• Waiting for response...
Receiving Header:
HTTP/1.1·200·OK(CR)(LF)

A redirected post feed uses another DNS based redirection.

Yes, folks, another DNS redirected URL. If I ever tire of the FeedBurner feed name "Nitecruzr-Blogging", I just setup a new FeedBurner feed, then change the redirect for the blog. And the instant that I change the redirect, people reading my feed get the new feed.

I could even setup a redirected feed in another service. But be aware that not all online services will use a redirected feed.

Use whatever feed redirect you wish - just make sure that the "Post Feed Redirect URL" setting points to a valid feed URL, and you're good to go.