6 June 06

Feedburner and Textpattern: redirecting your feed

I’ve been having a bit of a nightmare, and couldn’t find any good help converting a current RSS feed over the Feedburner one. The Feedburner forums are full of everyone asking the same question, but for different systems, such as Wordpress, and I couldn’t find a simple enough solution. Eventually I figured it out myself (with the help of various tutorials) and got it down to a few lines of code.

  1. RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} FeedBurner
  2. RewriteRule ^(rss|atom)/?$ /?$1=1 [QSA,L]
  3. RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner
  4. RewriteRule ^(rss|atom)/?$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/rikrikrik [R,L]

This goes in your .htaccess file which should be in the base of your Textpattern installation.

What does this do?
Very basically, the first two lines redirect the Feedburner crawler to your Textpattern-generated RSS (or Atom) feed, and the last two lines redirect everyone else (i.e. you, me and your feed reader) to the Feedburner-generated feed.

If you don’t know much about Apache and/or regular expressions, don’t worry. They’re for dull people like me to worry about. Just copy and paste the code. Obviously, you might want to change the last line to your own Feedburner. No, actually, keep it exactly like that. I might get some more people reading this…

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Comments

Comment by mark0 on 14 June 2006, 09:03

Hello Rik3. Old post, new comment. Is there an URL which I can point to which will deliver me a standard RSS format XML file? This feedburner device doesn’t make my RSS reader happy. Yet again, a technological advance has made my life more difficult.

Comment by Rik on 14 June 2006, 09:43

What seems to be the problem? I’ll have a look into it, and try and find a good solution! What feed reader are you using by the way?

Comment by mark0 on 15 June 2006, 08:39

The XML I’m getting off feedburner isn’t the format I am expecting. My RSS reader is a home-grown toy I knocked up a long time ago, and although it is rather basic it does exactly what I want (or did – until now, when advances in RSS distribution caused this stumbling block!).

Comment by Rik on 15 June 2006, 09:09

Hmmm, I’ve set Feedburner to “Smart Feed” which means it translates the feed into either RSS or Atom depending on whatever suits the client best, so it’s probably getting a bit confused due to your homemade client

Reach the widest possible audience by consolidating your subscription links into one feed that works in any reader, on the desktop, web, mobile devices and beyond. SmartFeed™ goes with everything.

Not quite everything then! I’ll have a search through the Feedburner forums and see if there’s anything.

Comment by mark0 on 16 June 2006, 08:17

Well, I’ve hunted around on Feedburner and I can’t find a solution. I think it’s a little unfair (of them) to exclude a reader which predates most of the readers they have in their “subscribe” list, and which was designed to work with RSS the way it was intended to work (i.e. you request an RSS file and get it).

Comment by Jorge Cocompech on 1 May 2007, 01:48

How can i call a category with your configuration?

Regards!

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