Web Talk

If you have a WordPress blog you should know that it comes with its own rss feed, right? You also know that Feedburner is a excellent service which lets you keep track of all of your feeds, giving you at the same time accurate statistics about your readers and what tools they use to burn your feeds. If you want to gain control over your readers, here is a nice piece of code to use. This code has to be put in your .htaccess located in your server, in the public_html folder. But what does it do? Let’s have a look at it:

# Redirect Feeds to Feedburner
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /(feed|wp-atom|wp-feed|wp-rss|wp-rdf|wp-commentsrss)(.+)\ HTTP/ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^feed [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} !^(FeedBurner|FeedValidator) [NC]
RewriteRule .* http://feeds2.feedburner.com/webtlk? [R=307,L]
RewriteRule ^comments/?.*$ http://feeds2.feedburner.com/webtlk/comments [L,R=302]

Basically, it redirects all of your WordPress rss feed to your Feedburner feeds. When a person clicks on the feed icon located in your Firefox address bar (or wherever you place it), he will be automatically redirected to Feedburner. In this way you will have a better idea of how many people read your blog.