Burning your Drupal feed in two easy steps

FeedBurner provides all kinds of neat stats, but it didn’t seem straight-forward to “burn” my blog feed since I’m using Drupal 5. After a little fiddling I think I’ve got a pretty good idea how to make it work in probably the simplest way possible. In fact, it doesn’t require and Drupal configuration at all.

1. First I set up a FeedBurner account and burned my feed. The feed Drupal produces for me is: http://ianloic.com/rss.xml. Now when I access http://feeds.feedburner.com/ianloic I get the contents of that feed. It’s pretty simple, but so far nobody is going to see that feed.
2. Then I simply told Apache to redirect all requests for that feed, except the ones from the FeedBurner bot to my FeedBurner feed. With the slight of hand magic of mod_rewrite this is pretty straight forward. In the root of every Drupal install there’s an .htaccess file containing a bunch of stuff. I just added a few lines to the mod_rewrite.c block of that file:

     # Rewrite rss.xml to http://feeds.feedburner.com/ianloic
     # unless FeedBurner is requesting the feed
     RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^ianloic\.com$ [NC]
     RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner.*
     RewriteRule ^rss.xml$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/ianloic [L,R=301]

   This will cause Apache to send a 301 redirect to http://feeds.feedburner.com/ianloic any time anyone requests http://ianloic.com/rss.xml, unless their HTTP User Agent begins with FeedBurner.

   Now I’ve got access to all the FeedBurner statistics and fun features. Since I didn’t actually touch the Drupal configuration I’m pretty sure a similar approach can be taken to applying FeedBurner to any feed.