How To Hide FeedBurner Feeds From Your Users?

Christopher Baus points out a problem with using the FeedBurner feeds in a comment: What if you decide you don't want this feed any more?

He's right and I though about this, too. As for any other free online tool, you cannot be sure if FeedBurner will still be available in - say - two years or so. That's a problem.

However, I'm interested in the FeedBurner stats...

What to do?

Let's have a look at my current configuration first: I provide two feed URLs, either /feed/rss2 or /feed/atom. Since I'm running WordPress, these already are virtual addresses that are rewritten by Apache to point to a specific PHP file. This file now acts as source for my FeedBurner feed, while /feed/* is temporarely redirected to FeedBurner (requests return a 302, not a 301 HTTP status code). I encourage people to keep on subscribing to my original feed URLs rather then to FeedBurner, so I should be able to switch back or redirect to any other source at any time.

Theoretically...

Pratically, there is the problem of people subscribing directly to the FeedBurner feed and not to - well - "my" feeds. This raises another question: How do people subscribe to feeds at all? I can think of four different ways:

1. Click one of that nifty subscription buttons.
2. Right click on the according feed icons and copy the address.
3. Click on the according feed icon so the feed page opens and copy the feed url form the browser's address bar.
4. Use a browser extension like LiveLines for Firefox (That's how I do it).

There is no problem with any of theses methods except for method number three, since the feed that opens in the browser is the FeedBurner feed.

I have no real solution at this time. However, I first switched off browser friendly feeds. They don't work in FireFox and Mozilla anyway, and they encourage people to subscribe directly to the FeedBurner feed. And it should keep search engines away from it, too.

I noticed that people who are not familiar with feeds or blogs tend to click on the syndication icons, but go back as soon as they realize that there's no HTML page behind. But this doesn't hold for experienced users who actually expect a XML feed, and it keeps unexperienced users from eventually subscribing to my page.

Second, I'm thinking of linking all my feeds using the feed protocol. So, instead of pointing to http://feed/rss2, I will point to feed://feed/rss2 instead. This should make the FeedBurner feed invisible. However, I need to do some research on this protocol and it's support in different browsers before implementing it.

Update: I switched on browser-friendly feeds, since I now can provide my own feed address to the subscription buttons.