Using FeedBurner

Pete Freitag’s post on guesstimating the number of people reading his feed reminded me that I hadn’t yet posted about me using FeedBurner on dwlt.net and with Tapestry. I first switched on FeedBurner for the Dilbert feed, to provide some information to United Media (it’s all gone quiet on that front, sadly), and it turns out that almost 42,000 people subscribe to that feed! Yow!

Even more surprising was the fact that 160 people subscribe to my own feed here. I figured that maybe six people subscribed, and one of them was me (to make sure it’s all working properly).

Anyway, to the point of this post: setting up FeedBurner was a doddle, but I was wondering if there was a way to set up the redirect transparently. Turns out that there is indeed a piece of mod_rewrite voodoo which I picked up from the FB forums and thought I’d call it out here, since I obviously have a captive audience :)

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner
RewriteRule ^dilbert\.xml$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/tapestrydilbert [R,L]

These two lines set things up so that any user agent apart from the FeedBurner bot are redirected to the FeedBurner version of the feed. The FeedBurner bot itself will pick up the original feed for processing. Nifty, huh?