Prompted by some problems with my RSS2 feed in Bloglines reported by David (thanks, David!), I've redirected both the Atom and RSS2 feeds to the FeedBurner feed. The biggest headache I've had in my frequent flits between different software tools for publishing this blog is breaking the URL for the feed. There are quite a few people who subscribe to the feed and rarely visit the site itself, so if the feed goes quiet for a while, they just think that I've stopped writing. Without a visit to the site, they have no way of knowing that it's just the feed that's broken.

If I run all my feeds through FeedBurner from now on, I can avoid this by having a stable URL for the feeds, and just switch the feed that FeedBurner pulls in if necessary, without end users noticing any problems. There are also other advantages to FeedBurner, like being able to pull in the Ma.gnolia links, present the content flexibly to feed readers, irrespective of whether they can read Atom feeds or not, and automatic validation of the feed.

If you're subscribed to one of the old feeds, your feed reader should just notice the redirect and store that as the URL for the feed from now on. Let me know if there are any glitches!