Letting others feed the web for you

I follow a ton of sites on the web. I go for a morning surf through each and every one of them; I use an aggregator which checks the feeds from the websites, and tell me where to go for news. I guess most people do this – using feeds to find updates and then visit the site to check out the content.This way of tracking sites has changed one important thing on this website – the most popular file on the site is no longer the frontpage nor is it at particular popular page with a high Google ranking – it’s the feeds. Until recently almost 25% of all inbound tracking was hits to the main feed-URL.

While I do appreciate the traffic, serving a feed is more a necessity/convenience than it is adding value to the site is self, and wouldn’t it be quite nice, if I could use the webserver resources for something better than letting aggregators know if I’ve change anything or not.

Well, guess what. I’m (almost) not wasting any server resources on feeds – FeedBurner handles that.

There really isn’t any magically in doing this – FeedBurner is pushing more than a million feeds, but there are three reasons why you should let feedburner (or an other feeding server) push your feeds:

• By using feedburner, I’ve moved a lot of traffic away from this server and thus pulling less traffic and a lesser load on the server.
• FeedBurner are assumable feed experts and they probably ensure the readers used by people tracking the site, get the best possible feed.
• Since FeedBurner Pro is Free, I can even brand the feeds with my own domain name, so that visitors don’t even know FeedBurner is serving the feeds. My mainfeed lives at http://feeds.netfactory.dk/netfactory

There are a few other cool benefits – Feedburner offers statistics on the feed usage and widgets I can use on the website, but the three above points should be enough to get most blogs and small websites to at least consider using FeedBurner.