Ok, fine. I know FeedBurner isn’t dead. But I can’t imagine it will last forever, and as a general rule I don’t like having business-critical things running on Google’s services.
When I moved away from Feedburner, I ended up replacing it with FeedPress, a paid service that gives publishers lots of tools to deal with their RSS feed, including statistics, custom host names, newsletters, and social media posting.
The last was especially important to me.
For years, 512 Pixels has had a Twitter account, which was recently joined by an account on App.net.
While I do tweet and update using these accounts, they primarily exist for readers who want to see my headlines via social media.
For years, I used a WordPress plugin to publish my headlines to Twitter automatically. Most options out there require a developer account at Twitter, but aren’t all that difficult to set up. Many plugins on the market don’t support linked list items, which ruled them out right away.
Recently, App.net launched PourOver, a tool that parses an RSS feed and posts articles as links to the service. It’s simple, easy to set up and supports linked list items. While I’m not using it, PourOver seems like a great option for people not using FeedPress.
I’m happy with FeedPress. They’ve been great to work with, and helped troubleshoot some issues I was seeing with my linked list items. Best of all, FeedPress is a real company with real income, and that makes me feel better about using it. And — thanks to how they re-direct feeds — if I need to make a change in the future, I can keep using my own URL and not have to ask readers to re-subscribe to a new one.