Feedburner Smart Feed : Single Feed for Better Tracking & Autodiscovery

Have you tried to subscribe feeds of some popular blogs by using news aggregators like Bloglines? You are offered numerous feeds like Atom, RSS 1, RSS 2 and so on…

Now which feed do you subscribe to?
This gets confusion for the subscribers. Actually all you’re really doing is fracturing your traffic and making it harder to get a handle on who’s subscribing to what.

Feedburner offers the “SmartFeed service: so that you could publish a single feed and rest assured that it can be read in all newsreaders out there, no matter what your source format is. So, sure, if you’re a Blogger user and you have an Atom feed, you could use FeedBurner to convert it to RSS 2.0 and then offer both feeds on your site. But it really makes much more sense to offer a single SmartFeed: that way, clients that understand Atom will get the original Atom version and clients that don’t understand Atom will get a converted-on-the-fly RSS 2.0 version. And you have a single place to go for all your stats.”

That also helps to get the statistics right about who actually are subscribing your feeds. Feed readers will “autodiscover” the Atom or RSS feed that’s associated with your site. So you not only need to fix the all feeds showing on links and tags to one feed, but also need to tidy up the autodiscovery links. They show you how by a simple change of code.