In my last post I talked about choosing Feedburner over Feedblitz to provide more options for what I can do with this blog’s RSS feed. However, I wanted to find a way that would allow me to have people subscribe to the RSS feed using a URL from sienno.com while still having the functionality provided by Feedburner. In addition, this would allow me to switch feed providers on the back end in the future should I want to move away from Feedburner without forcing subscribers to change the feed URL or redirecting people to the new URL.
Fortunately, there is a feature provided by Feedburner called MyBrand that lets blog publishers do just that. It’s relatively simple to setup for a wordpress.org blog, but I ran into a couple issues so I thought I’d put together this post to help others who want to do the same thing.
Note: This post assumes that you’ve already setup your blog and created your Feedburner feed. If you haven’t created a blog there are a ton of options out there. Since this blog runs on the WordPress platform and the blog post is about how to setup MyBrand on a WordPress blog, I recommend WordPress. If you already have a blog but need to setup your Feedburner feed there are Quick Start Guides provided by Feedburner for the most popular blogging platforms.
Activating MyBrand
The MyBrand feature within Feedburner is an account level feature, not a per-feed feature. However, even if you have multiple blogs/feeds being “burned” within a single Feedburner account you can still configure each blog independently.
Within Feedburner click on “My Account” in the top right of the page. In the left hand navigation of the My Account page click on the link for MyBrand. There you should see the three step process describing how to setup and activate the MyBrand feature.
Step 1 – Create CNAME within DNS
To be able to use the MyBrand feature you must be able to create a CNAME within your DNS. This functionality is available through most hosting providers and is certainly available if you are hosting the blog yourself. However, if the blogging platform is hosting the blog for you, i.e. wordpress.com, blogspot.com, you may not be able to setup MyBrand.
A CNAME basically creates a subdomain for your website that, in reality, lives at a completely different domain. For example, I have two CNAMEs currently for sienno.com, one for redirecting email.sienno.com to my Google Apps Gmail account and one for redirecting feeds.sienno.com to Feedburner.
On the Feedburner MyBrand page you should see the following information:
Use the unique Google URL shown on your own Feedburner page as the destination for your new CNAME record
You don’t have to use the subdomain, feeds, for your CNAME, but in many cases it’s the most logical choice (and the one that I chose). The second part that you need is the Google URL that is the real destination for your CNAME. Make sure you use the URL that Google provides you and not the one I have shown in the image above since your URL may differ from mine.
Don’t try to go to your CNAME quite yet. You need to complete the steps to activate MyBrand first.
Step 2 – Enter Your Feed Domain
This part is simple but helps to show how MyBrand is an account level feature and not a feed level feature. In Step 2 you’ll see:
All you need to do here is enter your CNAME + your domain name into the text box. As you can see, for this blog, it is feeds.sienno.com since feeds is the CNAME I chose. If you wanted to have your other burned feeds also use MyBrand and the blogs were on separate domains you would have multiple domains entered here, one for each burned feed.
Step 3 – Activate MyBrand
Once you have created your CNAME and entered your feed domain you can click the button to activate MyBrand. Initially MyBrand should be inactive:
But with one click of the “Activate” button you should see
Great! MyBrand is activated. But, wait. You’re not done yet. You still need to update your WordPress blog to send users to your new burned feed.
Redirecting Users to Your Feedburner Feed
Once you have MyBrand activated you need a way to redirect the links on your WordPress blog to your new feed URL. You could, of course, manually modify the links but that is not the best way to go about it, especially if you’re using a 3rd party WordPress theme and do not want to change the code.
Feedburner has a WordPress plugin, Feedsmith, that can be downloaded and installed. However, the documentation states that it is only compatible up through WordPress 2.5 and WordPress 3.0 is already out! So I looked for an alternative. Fortunately, there is a free WordPress plugin created by John Watson named FD Feedburner that is compatible with both of the most recent versions of WordPress, 2.9.2 and 3.0.
After downloading, installing, and activating the FD Feedburner Plugin you can reach its settings by going to Plugins -> Feedburner Configuration. There you will see this screen:
The field you need to fill in is the one labeled, Redirect my fields here. This is the one issue that I ran into when setting up MyBrand and the redirect. Initially, I put http://feeds.sienno.com/ into the text box but whenever I would click on the RSS link on the blog home page I would end up at the Feedburner home page and not at my RSS feed within Feedburner. So I went to Feedburner and looked at the details of my Feedburner feed. You can view these details by clicking on your feed within Feedburner and then clicking Edit Feed Details…
You’ll notice that my Feedburner feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/Sienno. The “Sienno” part is the important part here. What you need to do to get MyBrand working correctly is to include the path to your Feedburner feed in the URL that you put into the FD Feedburner configuration page within WordPress. For example, the URL that is used for this blog to direct people to my Feedburner RSS feed is:
http://feeds.sienno.com/sienno
As soon as I made that change everything started to work. You’ll notice a couple things on this blog as a result of this configuration:
- When you click on the RSS feed icon on the blog you end up on Feedburner’s site and can easily subscribe to the blog feed.
- When a user subscribes to the blog feed, the URL for the feed is the MyBrand URL; in this case, http://feeds.sienno.com/sienno. This is great because, as I stated at the top, if I ever switch from Feedburner to another feed management tool I don’t need to change my feed URL and risk losing subscribers.
- The URL that appears when a user hovers over the RSS icon link on the blog is still http://www.sienno.com/feed/ and not http://feeds.sienno.com/sienno/. This is because of how the FD Feedburner plugin works. It redirects to the new URL after the user clicks on the link. Ideally, I’d like the link on the page to show the new URL and not risk confusing the user, but it’s a minimal issue and not one I’m going to worry about at this time.
Hopefully this post helps you quickly implement the Feedburner MyBrand feature on your WordPress blog and eliminates any stumbling blocks. If you run into any issues following the steps above, let me know so I can clear up any confusion or correct any mistakes for future readers!
