feedburner – Ian McKellar

Out with the old, in with the goo(gle)

[flickr-photo:id=28961855,size=m] Some time ago I reworked my home page to feature content from various other sites I post to (blogs, flickr, delicious) by using some JSON tricks to pull in their feeds. I blogged about how to do this with Feedburner’s JSON API, so that my actual page was just static HTML and all the work was done client-side.

Last week I decided to revisit this using Google’s new AJAX feeds API. Feedburner‘s API never seemed to be well supported (it came out of a hackathon) and it forced me to serialize my requests. In the process I neatened up a bunch of the code.

Making dynamic static pages

UPDATE: I changed how this works and blogged about it. I wanted my home page to reflect what was going on in my life, or at least what content I was generating. There’s the concept of a lifestream floating around at the moment, but I was happy just to have a few sources (a couple …

Continue reading “Making dynamic static pages”

Burning your Drupal feed in two easy steps

[flickr-photo:id=136409681,size=m] 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.

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 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.