The past 24 hours have been spent testing and exploring the features of Feedburner, and the results are in. We have swapped out the RSS feed for this blog to a Feedburner feed. If you already subscribed to the RSS before yesterday, you do not need to do anything, unless you want to. The new feed is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/theavclub, but the old one still works too, so it’s ladies choice.

But why? Well we found that the features offered by Feedburner are significant, which I will explain after the jump, so as not to bore the casual readers.

Why do we like Feedburner so far?

1. It is one RSS feed address, and we can change the underlying RSS feed going into it. English motherf**ker, do you speak it? Yes. Basically if we decide to scuttle the blog, or change the address, or any myriad of possible things, we can repoint this feed to the new place, and keep you all up to date without hassling you with having to change the address of the feed. We can go anywhere we want and bring all of our subscribers with us.
2. Compatibility. There are something like 9 flavors of RSS and 2 of Atom feeds, and thanks to Feedburner, our one link works with all of them. That’s worth it right there. It allows you to use whatever you want to read the feed, and allows us to use one feed instead of tons, like you’ll see on some sites.
3. Stats. We use Mint for tracking our site stats, but getting it to properly handle the RSS feed was kind of a mess, and honestly its a different type of traffic, so the very detailed stats that Feedburner offers are useful to us.
4. Customization. In one great handy web based interface we have access to all kinds of modification of the feed. No more plugins, recoding, testing, checking, etc when we want to tweak the feed. Saves us time and makes the feed better for your enjoyment.
5. Upgrades. Feedburner does a lot to make sure that your feed works with the latest specs, especially the annoyingly fluid iTunes spec. They do most of the heavy lifting to get your feed readable in as many places as possible, and I like that.
6. Pings. Feedburner automatically pings the major blog directories like Technorati every time you update, so you are up to the second every time you post. That is big.
7. Cache. They cache and serve the RSS, meaning less overhead for your server. The images and any video content still lies on you to serve, but they lift the text, so that helps a little.
8. Toys. They offer a lot of interesting widgets and toys. See one of them over on our Myspace profile. Like? Hate?

Do you use Feedburner? Why/why not? Experiences welcome in the comments. And for those of you who do not yet use RSS, you are WASTING your time online. I cannot express how much more content you can access using RSS in less time.