There’s an easy way to direct all the traffic from your old feeds to the new - you can use a .htaccess file and also rework the header information in your pages to make sure no one gets the old feed.

Here you go:

Header for All 43 Folder Pages:

Note: put the< in front of the
link rel=”alternate” type=”application/rdf+xml” title=”RSS” href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/43Folders” /> link rel=”service.feed” type=”application/atom+xml” title=”Atom” href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/43Folders” />

Info for .htaccess file

1. Make a text file
2. Edit the below and put it in there.
3. Save.
4. Set permissions to 644
5. Test by trying to go to the old file - you should be redirected to feedburner’s

Contents of file:

RewriteEngine On RewriteRule ^rss.xml$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/43Folders [R] RewriteRule ^atom.xml$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/43Folders [R] RewriteRule ^index.rdf$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/43Folders [R] RewriteRule ^index.xml$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/43Folders [R]

You’ll need to double check what you originally called the old RSS and ATOM files - but this is the general setup.

Also remember that you may need to direct the pulls from Feedburner to the actual feed first. That is, if Feedburner is trying to use any of those files as the original feed, make sure you have a line based on the User-Agent to let it grab the file before you redirect everyone else, otherwise FB will not be able to get the feed, either.

I’m just luckily on the domain today rather than reading this through bloglines, but I just manually checked the atom feed at http://www.43folders.com/atom and this post isn’t on it, Shouldn’t this post be the last one on the old feeds so people can catch this notice in their newsreaders instead of figuring it out when they start experiencing withdrawal symptoms and scramble to the homepage to figure out what’s going on?

Thanks for the heads-up, Kalin. I think it’s fixed now.

Thanks also for the great Apache fu, Jay. I wouldn’t be surprised if the nimble elves at TypePad made that easy to do some day soon.

Feedburner Sucks. It sucks as hard as possible when it comes to linkblog feeds.

Why does it suck so hard? Feedburner redirects the permalink (or for linkblogs and del.icio.us syndication, the main link) through feedburner.com, obscuring the destination URL.

Why is this bad? Well, in today’s web of tertiary link text and the same things getting linked over and over in the linkblogs you read, It is impossible to figure out what people are linking to by hovering over the link and glancing at the browser’s status bar. It breaks the way browsers display recently-clicked links in a different color.

It absolutely borks any kind of feed-crawling search engine. Technorati sucks enough as it is, don’t make feed searching worse.

Ostensibly it would make your feed a marketer’s wet dream, you get exact clickthrough stats from Feedburner. Don’t do this. It isn’t worth breaking the web and pissing off your readers.

I’ll just continue to suscribe to your del.icio.us/merlinmann feed, you’ll inevitably link to your own posts through there. But I won’t be suscribing to your new, broken, Feedburner feed. No way.

I do not see any way to get an Atom version from Feedburner, and besides, I just got rid of all those stupid Feedburner subscriptions, I have no intention of going back.

I guess if you don’t update the feed, you don’t update it. I’m not going to bother resubscribing.

Sorry to see you kids go. I hate to lose readers for reasons other than my sucky writing.

Regrettably, FeedBurner’s a done deal, but I do hope you’ll keep visiting the site from time to time.

Why are you hosting your feeds with Feedburner anyway? What’s the point?

@Fred: FeedBurner does lots of things that make my life easier and cannot easily be accomplished with a raw feed.

Although my primary interest is the stats they provide, FB also bears the bandwidth burden of handing 10,000 nice people like yourself free content every day. As I’m sure you’ve observed on your own sites, serving XML to lots of people takes a fair amount of pipe—more than I can afford even within the generous limits of a TypePad account.

If you like, Fred, I’d be happy to continue discussing this offline.

Hi - I did as you asked, un-subbed, and re-subbed. Now how about doing something for me? Feed the whole article so I don’t have to click through, and can read it in Bloglines.
Thanks. Susan