Subscribers: Update Your Feed URLs

Updated January 29, 2023 • One comment

This post is for any feed subscribers out there.. please update your feed URL if you want to continue getting Perishable Press articles in your feed reader. Again for those in the back: update the feed URL for Perishable Press if you want to stay subscribed. This is necessary because Google finally has killed the once awesome Feedburner service.

Our New Feed URL

Our new (and permanent) Feed URL (RSS2 format):

https://perishablepress.com/feed/

That replaces the Feedburner URL. It won’t be changed again.

Other Feeds & Formats

Here are some other feeds and formats:

Main content/posts feed:

Atom - https://perishablepress.com/feed/atom/
RDF  - https://perishablepress.com/feed/rdf/
RSS  - https://perishablepress.com/feed/rss/

WordPress feed:

https://perishablepress.com/category/wordpress/feed/

Comments feed:

https://perishablepress.com/comments/feed/

To find other feeds/formats, check out What is My WordPress Feed URL?

Why are we here?

Long story short: Way back in 2003 everyone started using Feedburner to serve their syndication feeds. Then in 2007, a few years after Feedburner really took off, Google purchased Feedburner for $100 million. Initially everyone was excited about the acquisition, but after a few years of Google ownership, it became apparent that Google bought Feedburner simply to let it die.

Why would Google do this? From what I’ve read, Google search is not needed to subscribe to a feed. So Google viewed Feedburner as a direct competitor and used its $$$ to shut it down. So basically, Google bought the largest feed service and literally did nothing with it, to prevent it from growing, thriving, and competing.

Fast forward another 10 years and Feedburner now is pretty much dead.

Lessons Learned

The big take-home lesson here is that reliance on 3rd-party sites is a fool’s errand. Back in 2004, I thought Feedburner looked like a great way to serve my RSS feeds. So I followed along with what all the influencers were doing and switched my feeds over from local URLs to Feedburner URLs. I even wrote a bunch of tutorials on how to redirect WordPress feeds to Feedburner, how to optimize Feedburner feeds, and other Feedburner focused topics.

What a mistake that was. Yes it was fine and interesting and even fun for awhile. But as the years went by, everyone saw how Google wasn’t doing anything with Feedburner, and we knew the end was near. Various features of the service would break, and rather than fixing them, Google would just remove the feature. It’s been very frustrating watching it all happen, in slow motion, over the years.

So now here we are: 2023 and Feedburner is dead man walking. All those hundreds of thousands if not millions of people who switched their feeds over to Feedburner now have to bite the bullet, find a suitable Feedburner alternative, and then put in the work to reconfigure everything. Hopefully not losing too many subscribers along the way. For my own sites, I’m just gonna skip any 3rd-party service and handle everything directly, in-house style.

Life Lesson: Relying on anyone but yourself probably is a mistake. Especially online.

Feedburner Alternatives

If you don’t need any tracking or statistics about your feeds, you can just let WordPress (or whatever CMS you’re using) serve all of your feeds for you. Downside is no stats; upside is you own your feed and won’t have to go through this again later in the future. If you do need tracking and stats for your feeds, here are some Feedburner alternatives to give you some ideas:

About the Author

Jeff Starr = Fullstack Developer. Book Author. Teacher. Human Being.