Podcasting: What is Feedburner and why you shouldn’t use it | Tech Help for Churches

Podcasting: What is Feedburner and why you shouldn’t use it

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On today’s Tech Help for Churches, Podcasting: What is Feedburner and why you shouldn’t use it

Back in 2005, there wasn’t an easy way to add iTunes tags to your podcast feed (unless you hand-coded it). Enter Feedburner. It made it easy to add these tags and find out some important things about your feed. When Google bought them, I breathed a sigh of relief, thinking, “Now, they’re safe. Google won’t go under, so they’ll be around forever.”

[tweet “In the old days, podcasters used feedburner, here’s why it’s not a good idea today:”]

Fast forward to today. Google has killed a bunch of services and every round, somehow, feedburner escapes death.

Today, though we have other ways to get the iTunes tags into our feeds. In fact, if you use PowerPress, it even adds Google Play tags into the feed. So, why use feedburner?

There really isn’t a good reason to use it, except in one situation. If you’re using blogger for your feed and you want to podcast, feedburner is a way to do it.

Some might say that you can use feedburner as a hedge of protection around your feed, changing the source of the feed as you will and not losing audience. That’s true…unless Feedburner itself goes away. This is a very real possibility.

Also, a lot of the feature in Feedburner (especially the ones that are for podcasters) actually break podcast feeds. So, you’ll need to make sure you don’t use them, if you did use it.

All in all, I recommend that you don’t use it and if you find someone still recommending it, be careful.

For more information on what feedburner is and why you shouldn’t use it, watch the video above.

Join the conversation; call 1-877-763-3246, leave a comment below the video, or hit me up on Twitter (@PaulAlanClif)

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