For those bloggerdoodlers out there, you understand that blogs can take up your precious time, they are valuable, fun, exciting and the last thing that you want to do is build up traffic to your blog and then completely disown it, because that would just be a huge waste of time and completely pointless.

Well, that is exactly what I have had to do because I got burned by Feedburner…

Let me tell you the reason behind my madness because it just may make you think twice before signing up with Feedburner.

Recently I have been blogless due to some tricky behavior from feedburner.com (Feedburner allows you to track who subscribes to your feed and can track behaviour of your subscribers). I heard the hype and was soon thereafter reeled in, so I subscribed my blogs feed to Feedburner and thus I thought I was in for a treat… However I realized that once I had subscribed my feed with Feedburner I had just sold my blogs wee soul.

It wasn’t too long after this that I got a magical idea in my brain to display my most recent feeds on the homepage of my website, so I went about to set up some code via PHP to do this very thing. That night I got it to work and I thought it was fantabulous.

The next day I woke up and decided to view my wonderful home page with my blogs feed displaying in all its glory, however it was no longer working! For hours I tried to revive my poor parsing feed to display the good news, however to no avail it was defunct. So I went about the crevices of the web in search for an answer and this is what I found out (in a simplified nutshell).

In order to get a feed story to post on another website it requires a PHP file (or another type of code) to fetch the data every (x) minutes or hours. Feedburner doesn’t like this because it would slow down their server if everybody was doing it, due to all the requests being run automatically. So they have simply put a cut-off point into their website that simply follows the rule,

IF asked to parse a feed more than (x) times within (x) hours THEN don’t parse that feed ever again!

Now I understand why Feedburner has done this, however the scariest part of this story was trying to remove my feed from Feedburners services, because in all honesty they have made it nearly impossible and completely inefficient!

If you ever decide to cancel your Feedburner service they will make sure that your feed will be down for at least 30 days!! That is 30 days without adding anything to your blog, 30 days without your subscribers visiting your blog and for some thats 30 days where you have almost 0 advertising dollars! Now thats a problem. Moreso what I have had to do is change my blogs URL completely as they have been displaying this message on my feed for over 3 months!

So beware of your feeds necessary addiction to Feedburner and also beware that you are passing over your most valuable asset, the readers, to a third party and when their service is down, so is yours! Read more here.

About the Author:  Rob Johnson is a freelance web developer who has a passion for online marketing. He is an Addy Award winner and currently teaches a New Media Strategies class at BYU-Idaho.