Immerseme

Feedburner (www.feedburner.com) is an online service that offers some handy help for your XML feeds, particularly if you are creating a podcast.  Using the basic functionality of feedburner is free and, as a result, I recommend it for several reasons.

When you use feedburner, you give feedburner the address of the XML feed from your blog element (I will refer to this as the "raw feed").  If this is not making sense to you, make sure you have read our tutorial on podcasting with the blog element.  Feedburner takes your raw feed and enhances it with other special features and then generates its own feed, based on your feed.  You then share the feedburner address for your feed instead of the address of your raw feed.

Example:
As mentioned in our podcasting tutorial, your raw feed might have an address such as:

http://[yourdomain]/rss.aspx?p=2647...etc.

You would enter that address on feedburner's site, go through their easy-to-follow setup process and then they would supply you with another address, which might look like this:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourname/yourfeedname

Feedburner's feed pulls information from your raw feed.  It is still updated every time you add new content and pushes that content out to anyone who is subscribed.

So why would I want to use Feedburner?
There are several compelling reasons to use feedburner to generate a new feed address instead of simply sharing your raw feed address:

    1.    Feedburner enhances your feed with additional information.  Feedburner gives you the opportunity to add information to your feed that you can't add otherwise.  This information includes things like a feed description, copyright information and even some specific information that is helpful for iTunes like an image that iTunes will use when displaying your podcast.  It is easy to set this information up through feedburner using their system.
    2.    Feedburner provides you some statistics about how many subscribers you have to your feed.
    3.    Your feedburner feed address will be simpler than your raw feed address, making it easier to share.
    4.    When sharing your feed directly instead of through iTunes, feedburner provides you a nice landing page which can help your potential subscriber figure out how to subscribe to your feed.  Click on the podcast page and click on the orange XML link under the podcast.  You will be taken to the feedburner landing page for our feed.  You can see how this page provides a good bit of helpful information about our podcast, instead of just displaying the raw XML code.

Get Started
I recommend that you take advantage of the benefits that feedburner can provide your feed at no cost.  This will help take your podcast to a new level of professionalism and quality.  To get started:

    1.    Set up your podcast feed through a blog element on your site.  To see our tutorial on this, click here.
    2.    Take the raw feed address generated by your blog element and burn that feed on feedburner.
    3.    Publish and share the feedburner feed address with your site visitors.