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.
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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. -
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 themod_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 tohttp://feeds.feedburner.com/ianloic
any time anyone requestshttp://ianloic.com/rss.xml
, unless their HTTP User Agent begins withFeedBurner
.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.