For Mike: Redirecting feed subscribers in Movable Type to FeedBurner

Last night, Mike asked how to redirect his existing feed subscribers to his FeedBurner feed. While directions for the generic process are here, here’s a simplified version for Movable Type users:

• Login to Movable Type, find your RSS template, change the “output file” to another filename, like index-feedburner.xml


• Click on “templates”, then “create new index template”


• Give the template a name (“htaccess” would make sense, since we’re creating an .htaccess file), and in the “output file” field, type in “.htaccess” (no quotes, but the period before the h is required)


• Type in “Redirect temp [path to your current feed] [url of your FeedBurner feed]” (again, no quotes). By way of example, my redirect reads: “Redirect temp /tins/rss.xml http://feeds.feedburner.com/tins”.


• Click save, then rebuild (you can rebuild just this template)

• Go to FeedBurner, login, and make sure that you’ve got the source feed URL set to your new feed file (in the above example, index-feedburner.xml)

After that, your webserver will redirect all incoming requests for your feed to FeedBurner. If you’re ever dissatisfied with FeedBurner (which we’ll take quite personally, I assure you), you just delete this file and go back to publishing your RSS feed at your public feed URL. As long as the redirect’s in place, you’ll now see aggregated stats on your feed — people who are subscribed to the feed at your domain as well as any who’ve subscribed to the FeedBurner feed directly.

Hope this helps, let me know if you need any tips.

NOTE: The above steps will overwrite any existing .htaccess file you have in place; it would be wise to verify that there’s not an .htaccess file already in your blog’s root directory. (If there is, you can copy its contents into the template you create in Movable Type.) If this sounds unfamiliar to you, better to let someone who understands this. Otherwise you risk breaking some stuff, which wouldn’t be fun. Proceed with caution. Take with food. Don’t operate heavy machinery while following these instructions. No animals were harmed in the construction of this post. Objects in browser may be larger than they appear. Yadda yadda yadda…

More on .htaccess here. It’s an incredibly powerful tool (careful, with great power comes great responsibility…).