I use FeedBurner for all my RSS feeds. In fact, I even use FeedBurner for my FeedBlendr-ed mix of feeds. It’s just that useful, at least to me and a sufficiently large community out there.

For the uninitiated, FeedBurner is a free service (you can get premium services for a fee) that acts a middleman between your blog or site’s RSS/Atom feeds, and your readers. You pass it your raw feed, and the result is a FeedBurner managed feed, such as the one you see on this blog. The reason why you’d want to use such a middleman is the diverse features FeedBurner offers. Just check out Micro Persuasion’ list of ten FeedBurner “hacks”, or rather, functions.

Of the list, I use all except Nos. 1 (haven’t found any feeds that needed reformatting), 4 (a paid service? – no thanks), and 5 (stats in a widget? – nah). Especially useful to me a couple of months back was No. 8 – i.e. using FeedBurner to ping the various services, e.g. Technorati, PubSub and Ping-O-Matic. This was when Ping-O-Matic – the default ping server all WordPress blogs use – started slowing down dramatically, resulting in super-slow publishing of posts. By offloading the pinging process to FeedBurner, posting became a breeze.

So, that’s my take on FeedBurner. What about you? Any FeedBurner features you especially favour?

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