Feedburner, Planet Venus and categorized posts

This post gives some insight for blog owners how to tune WordPress & Feedburner when  posting their posts to various open source planets / aggregation services.

1. Preface

Google’s Feedburner is a popular feed subscriber statistics service for blog owners. Planet Venus is popular feed aggregation service software used by many open source projects to create a website of gathered RSS feeds (an example).

WordPress is a popular blogging software and has a plug-in which will automatically enable feedburner statistics for all the feeds using HTTP redirects. For a blogger using the plug-in means painless set-up of Feedburner statistics on his/her blog.

2. Problem

Usually planets (the aggregation services) are only interest blog posts of a certain category (it this example let’s call the category “plone”). WordPress enables categorized RSS 2.0 feeds using URLs of the following syntax

http://opensourcehacker.com/category/plone/feed/

Then this URL is put into the configs of Planet Venus and Planet Venus starts aggregating posts of a certain category from the source blog.

Now, if the blog is feeding out both categorized posts AND is using a feedburner a problem rises. The feedburner redirects at the feedburner.google.com might not properly handle categorized feeds. Instead, you’ll get an error page saying “looks like your computer might be doing too much automated requests” or something along the line.

3. Solution

Luckily there is an easy fix. In the WordPress Feedburner plug-in settings tick the following option:

Settings -> Feedburner ->

This should allow the aggregators to gather the categorized posts and still use Feedburner stats for the users who subscribe the main RSS feed or your blog.

 

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