FeedBurner: The Review

So I've given FeedBurner some extra time to sort itself out. I'm not 100% happy, but I've decided that It May Stay. (However, if it puts its feet on the couch, leaves the toilet seat up, or eats my Tim Tams*, it's O-U-T-the-door.)

Here's a play-by-play.

Reliability: 4/5
Setup: 4/5
Features: 5/5
Ease of use: 4/5
Integration with Blogger and Google: 5/5
Syndication speed: 3/5

In the reliability stakes, I'm still getting messages telling me my xml page has "failed", which stops syndication dead. However, half an hour later I get a message that all is well, without me doing anything. FeedBurner seems to have issues with server lag. I hope it's temporary.

Setup of any new system is a pain. The downfall for FeedBurner is the sheer number of options. Fully-featured is sometimes a bad thing, and some were impossible for me to understand. As for the options I want, it has them all, and I'm happy with them.

As far as integration goes, only products owned by Google can earn 6 out of 5, however, it's not yet 100% integrated and sometimes pops up a Blogger window inviting you to paste code in manually. I expect that in time this will be seamless.

Now... speed? Or should I say... lack thereof. FeedBurner has never spontaneously syndicated my RSS feed within 4 hours of posting. Left to its own devices, the posts appear in Google Reader well after 1pm. The site post time is always 9:XXam on the blog, however. This is frustrating. However, as long as they still arrive each day I will accept this as the one truly abysmal part of FeedBurner.

* If you don't know what a Tim Tam is, or you've never had one, you MUST seek out a local seller and try them. Also sold as "Arnott's Biscuits" overseas, they are biscuit orgasms. When I say biscuit, it's like a cookie but not. A Tim Tam is two chocolate malt cookies (not as chocolatey as Oreos) with a creamy vaguely chocolate filling (but not strong or sickening sweet) and covered in milk chocolate. And no matter how it's described, it doesn't do the food justice. A favourite pastime of Australian talk show hosts is to make American guests eat these, and the guests are regularly reduced to wordlessness and/or expressions of blissful disbelief. "Mmmmmmmm!" and "Ohhhhh!" and "That is Soooooooo good!" are fairly regular comments. So yeah. Go find them somewhere like Google. It is soooo worth it.