So you have some feeds and you want to track subscriptions using FeedBurner.

The problem?

FeedBurner is a great service and probably will stay that way since it was recently acuired by google. However, it is still a 3rd-party service and that’s somthing you should always be worried about.

You see, when someone subscribes to a burned feed, they will be pointing the agregator to: <feeds.feedburner.com/your-feed>. This means that you will loose all of your subscribers if any of the following happens:

• FeedBurner goes down, closes shop, or starts charging an outrageous fee. (unlikely)
• The person who set up the account forgets the password, or becomes a disgruntled employee. (possible)
• A better service comes along and you decide to switch. (very likley)

The solution

The simple solution is to have users subscribe to a feed on your domain.

1. Create a folder structure for the feeds – like: /feeds/news/ and /feeds/videos.
2. In each folder create an index page using you favorite server-side language – index.php, index.cfm, etc. This gives us added flexibility. We can even change the language at a later date!
3. Use this page to mirror the FeedBurner feed. below is an example in ColdFusion. In PHP you will want to look into cURL:

<!----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
-  This is a placeholder for a feed.
-  Make sure to link to the folder and not this .cfm page for even more flexibility.
-  Created:   2008-04-09 Gabriel McGovern
-  Modified:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------->

<cfhttp url="http://feeds.feedburner.com/pcc-videos/">
<cfoutput>#cfhttp.filecontent#</cfoutput>