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| Dealing with RSS feeds: Integrating Feedburner with Joomla |
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If you use RSS for your site and you have a decent amount of traffic constantly flowing to your content, you really need to become friends with Feedburner, it can save your growing site. Feedburner is a free web 2.0 service that Google just purchased (in the last year or so) that takes RSS XML and translates them into a variety of different formats. It also provides statistics of how many people are subscribed to your content. It does this by pinging various different feed readers to figure out on average how many people are subscribed to you that day (its not an exact science, but it remains very very useful). Feedburner also allows you to mashup your content feeds with other feeds. For instance I have this blog feeding through Feedburner as well as my Del.icio.us bookmark feed for Joomla Packages . So whenever I find a site worth telling all you about I just bookmark it normally and it is mashed into Joomla Packages' developer feed . I think though the best function of Feedburner is that it offloads subscription traffic to the larger bandwidth Google pipe. What does that mean? You'll need to know how RSS functions in order to understand Feedburner's worth. When a feed reader subscribes to your blog feed it opens its mouth to your content, which is great! Depending on the feed reader that your subscriber uses, it will then ping your site for new content every 15 mins, 10 mins, 5 mins...etc. This is the equivalent of driving in the car with those annoying children who keep saying, “are we there yet?” Since you promised to feed those mouths, you need to tell them that there is nothing new for them to read. Of course this isn't a huge problem when we are caching our feeds, but if you have a high-profile site (or plan to), then cache sometimes is not enough. I've dealt with some high-profile political sites that were dealing with thousands of hits a day from real people and thousands more from spiders. Most of the spider traffic that these clients were dealing with were not from nice spiders (perhaps I'll go into detail some other time). The number one thing that they were pinging were the RSS feeds. If you are dealing with a Joomla site with multiple components, many of which have their very own RSS (comments, blog, forum,...) you may be in for a ride with rogue spiders who won't listen to robots.txt. The best way to deal with these issues is Feedburner. You'll turn all your syndication over to a system that does it better and can handle all the “are we there yet” pings.
Integrating Feedburner with Joomla.
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