As a quick mental diversion today I decided to try out Feedburner instead of the direct RSS feed that I had previously implemented. I also changed my feed icon to the new standard feed icon.

Feedburner provides me with a statistical overview of my RSS traffic but more importantly, they make it much easier for viewers to subscribe to my feed.

It has an easy sign-up procedure and monetizes by item click-throughs and inline ads. I'll have to see if the data is enticing enough to pay $5 a month for the service. I'm guessing my traffic isn't large enough to warrant it though.

The interesting part was figuring out how to automatically redirect all my existing traffic. A simple mod_rewrite rule that permanently redirects all agents that don't identify themselves as Feedburner was all that was needed.

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !FeedBurner
RewriteRule ^rss/?$ http://feeds.feedburner.com/MichaelGlenn [R=permanent,L]

Simple! Assuming your news reader obeys permanent redirects.