One week ago, I switched my feeds from local to FeedBurner. I had some concerns, mostly related to multilingual aspects. But, at the end, the operation went smoothly.

• This post is an english translation of the post FeedBurner: opération réussie

The following diagram shows the evolution of local subscriptions and FeedBurner’s subscriptions.

I still have some readers on local feeds, but their number remains less than 10 per day.

From a technical standpoint, redirect RSS feeds to FeedBurner can be done with two methods:

• Write redirection rules within the file .htaccess: redirections are managed at the web server level, without using WordPress, nor PHP,
• Use a plugin like FeedSmith, which intercept and redirect local requests to FeedBurner.

I chose the second solution: First, I do not master the syntax of .htaccess, and then I wanted to manage the multilingual aspects. FeedSmith plugin is simple to understand: I used it, and just adding the required PHP lines to the management English language.

The result is quite effective. In a few days, I will disable the software FeedStats that allowed me to get statistics on my local subscriptions. Then I will measure the effect of this migration on the blog’s performances.