Redesign: RSS and FeedBurner
22 March 2020 | 8th Edition
Over the years this site has made great use of RSS feeds as a means of publicising new content when it's uploaded and live.
To syndicate the feed (that is, to push it out to news and feed readers) we have been using Google's FeedBurner tool. Once independent, then bought by Google in 2006, this once great free tool, although still functioning, is no longer being actively developed or supported by Google. The evidence being various sub-services within it being stopped, and it hasn't been supported for a while. It is just withering on the vine.
Knowing this, and knowing how Google might simply switch it off at some point, I have decided that our feed will be deleted from it.
This might seem rash, after all with millions of feeds still aggregated by FeedBurner would it really be stopped? Would Google ride that backlash?
But it's done — a forwarding link from FeedBurner to our native feed.xml file on this site has kept the change seamless.
And this does fit with the recent redesign's goals of being less reliant on third-party tools. To be honest, maybe this should've been done years ago. It just happens that the timing is convenient to do this now.
By the way there are other similar services to FeedBurner out there, feedblitz.com being maybe the front runner, if you want to check them out.
The new direct feed url: www.thedarkfortress.co.uk/feed/feed.xml.
The forwarding link is working fine. But in some cases it might mean resubscribing to the feed in your news reader again. To do this paste www.thedarkfortress.co.uk into the reader's add new content/subscribe search and the feed should appear. I say should, if it doesn't, depending on your reader, then use the full url of the feed.
Read this great article here from Vice on the demise of FeedBurner Google's forgotten service: how feedburner became a zombie.
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