WordPress & Feedburner: Use a plugin.
Here’s another boring meta post, but with a valuable lesson.
When I first set up this blog, I created a Feedburner feed to give me some idea of how many people were subscribing to my feed. To direct people to the feed, I edited my template and added hard links to the Feedburner feed URL. Since then the subscriber count has slowly grown to about 200 subscribers.
While I was creating my new blog theme the other day I noticed that not all the links were pointing to my Feedburner feed. Most notably, the <link> element in the <head> of the pages that causes browsers with RSS support to “light up” was still pointing to the old feed. That made me wonder how many people were subscribing directly to my feed and how many were subscribing to the Feedburner feed.
When I recently set up a WordPress blog for my wife, I downloaded and installed the FD Feedburner Plugin which worked well for her blog. I installed it on my blog, removed all the hard links from the template files and waited to see what would happen. The plugin works by issuing a 301 permanent redirect to the Feedburner URL for all incoming requests to the built-in feed URL, unless those requests come from Feedburner in which case it serves up the raw feed.
Two days after installing the plugin I went back and checked my subscriber count and was shocked to see it had jumped up to 384. Not a bad jump for such a small change.