WordPress : Redirecting Your Original Feed to Your Feedburner Feed

Posted by Pubudu Kodikara on Jan 28, 2010 in Tips and Tricks (Hacks), Web | 28 comments

Most of us bloggers use Feedburner to burn our feeds. The main reason to do this is, that Feedburner have lots of features than the normal RSS feeds. Just sending our feeds through Feedburner won’t help us. We need to tell our readers that we use the service! But, still people prefer to use the original feeds which appear on the address bar of their browser! So, how to tell these people that we use Feedburner?

What most of us does is, just burn our feeds from feedburner and then add a big button on our sidebar saying “Subscribe to our feeds”. Will this help us? Not completely… As I said earlier, still most of the users prefer to use the traditional method (Use the icon that appears on the address bar) to subscribe to the feeds.

So, to send those visitors to feedburner, we need to redirect our original feeds. Now, how to do this? There are two methods:

One is by using .htaccess file, can be used on a site which have .htaccess enabled! (most of the hosts have this feature).

Second method is to use a wordpress plugin called FeedSmith. (This is the most reliable method)

.htaccess method (Source) :

• To use this method, open you .htaccess file and add the following code before the code added by wordpress (Before the line “# BEGIN WordPress“)

# Redirect /feed/ to Feedburner (if not Feedburner bot)

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

RewriteEngine on

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner

RewriteRule ^feed/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/ur-url [R,L]

</IfModule>

Use of Feed Smith :

• To get this Feed Smith plugin, visit : http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=78483

By doing this redirection, we are able to double our subscriber count within one day! That means, we had lots of people, subscribed to our original feed! So, what do you say about it? Did you got the same results?