Trying out FeedBurner / Flickr

This weekend, I was trying to extend my web design skills, so I was crawling through the code of my friend Caterina's site (I've always admired her site design) and noticed that her RSS feed was linking out to FeedBurner. Then, just this morning, one of my colleagues asked me what I knew about FeedBurner, and I said, "Not much." All this after I had meaning to go back and look deeper into the Flickr / FeedBurner announcement several weeks ago that slipped by while I was on vacation. FeedBurner, FeedBurner, FeedBurner -- time to check out FeedBurner.

I decided to redirect my RSS feed over to FeedBurner. Subscribers shouldn't notice anything -- I inserted a temporary redirect into our Apache config while I'm trying this out (so please don't subscribe to the new URL!):

Redirect temp /dickerson/rss.xml http://feeds.feedburner.com/infoworld/dickerson

After an hour using FeedBurner, I'm already really pleased with the stats reporting on my RSS feed: click-throughs on individual items and the number of subscribers (something I could easily get for Bloglines, but not as easily for the general universe). So far, so good for something that is pre-alpha.

Incidentally, if you have a digital camera and you have friends (and here's hoping you have both), you have to sign up for Flickr -- now. I don't know quite how to explain the visceral thrill of using Flickr to post photos, share them with friends, and gather their comments. Not to mention your window into the photo streams of people you don't know who have made their photos public. You have to use Flickr to really get it. You can subscribe to an RSS feed that alerts you when someone has commented on your photos, which is really nice. (Full disclosure: the Caterina mentioned above works for Ludicorp, the folks who you bring you Flickr, but I'm posting this only because I think Flickr is really cool. Flickr seems to be percolating around InfoWorld right now -- Jon Udell ties Flickr into a discussion of enterprise knowledge gardening in his latest InfoWorld column.)