Google Reader is retired next week – have you switched to Feedly?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 12 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Next week, Google is set to retire Google Reader. When I wrote this post (back in March), almost 75% of the subscribers to my feed (already dwindling, partly as a result of Google algorithm changes that seem to penalise independent views in favour of branded content) came via Google Feedfetcher (used by Reader to grab RSS or Atom feeds), suggesting that lots of you use Google Reader.

Hopefully you’ve all found a way to move forward but, if you haven’t, I recommend checking out Feedly.

If you migrate before Google turns off Reader, it’s a one-click migration (just log into Feedly with your Google account) – I did it weeks ago and haven’t looked back since!

Here are a couple of links that might be useful:

Now I need to look at moving my site’s RSS away from Feedburner, before Google kills that off too (I’m sure it’s only a matter of time…)

Adding Twitter’s RSS to Feedburner

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 13 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I spent some time yesterday afternoon working my way through an article on SEO-ing Twitter profile pages.  Whilst I don’t agree with absolutely every point in the article (e.g. tinyurl.com is too many letters for a URL shortener – I like to use bit.ly with a custom domain), it does contains some good advice (who would have thought of naming their Twitter profile picture to include appropriate keywords?). One point that doesn’t work though, is feeding your Twitter RSS feed to Feedburner.

There is a workaround though. Following Michael Phipps’ advice, I created a page called twitterfeed.php with the following code:

I then fed the URL for this page into Feedburner. I’d prefer to use an address on my own domain though – and it’s simple enough to create an HTML page to redirect to the correct location (and to add information for browsers to recognise the RSS location):



@MarkWilsonIT on Twitter

Redirecting to the @MarkWilsonIT Twitter RSS feed. If you’re not redirected within a couple of seconds,
try this link: @MarkWilsonIT on Twitter


The downside of this is that Outlook doesn’t like an RSS feed that’s redirected from HTML. Google Reader seems happy with the redirection although, because it does actually resolve to the Feedburner address, it won’t help me should I move the feed elsewhere in future…

In the end, I’m not sure what this achieves, but you can now subscribe to my tweets via RSS…