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Make Multiple FeedBurner Feeds, For Multiple Uses

Sometimes, blog owners need complicated and conflicting feed setups, for multiple uses.

One blog owner asks
I want a email blog posts feed, using snippets of the posts, so my email subscribers will click on the snippets and read the blog itself. I would prefer that newsfeed readers have the option to read the entire post, in their readers.
At first glance, this is an impossible request. FeedBurner can't do two things, with one feed.

Fortunately, FeedBurner, like most Google services, is free - and there's no limit to the number of feeds that you can make.

If you have two (or more) content distributions planned, for your blog, setup two (or more) FeedBurner feeds.

You probably have subscribers - and they need Full blog posts newsfeeds.

If you want your newfeed subscribers to be able to read the complete posts in their feed readers, have a FeedBurner feed to distribute the complete posts feed. People will subscribe to the posts feed using the feed links - so set the Posts Feed Redirect to target this feed, and provide a "Subscribe" gadget in the sidebar.

You might want to send brief post snippets to email subscribers.

If you want your email subscribers to get post snippets, setup a second FeedBurner feed, using the "Email Subscriptions" feature, and add "Summary Burner". Then add a "Follow by Email" gadget, to the blog, targeting the second feed.

You could even offer your readers multiple email delivery times, to suit their preferences. Cut in half the email subscriber delivery latency.

You could have a Full feed, to support a dynamic template, even.

You could use a secondary feed for abbreviated content, with the primary feed used with a blog published to a dynamic template. Dynamic templates require the complete blog feed (comments and posts), set as "Full". A secondary feed can provide your readers the ability to subscribe to an abbreviated feed, by activating Summary Burner.

If you look at the FeedBurner menu, you can probably come up with more ideas.

Take a look at the FeedBurner menu sometime. I bet that you can find other FeedBurner features that would be useful to some readers, but not others. I also use BrowserFriendly, to provide a consistent subscription display - and I use SmartFeed, to dynamically provide the right feed format.

See the concept, in real life.

If you're a skeptic, like me, maybe you want to see this idea, for real. So, you are welcome to examine my FeedBurner Full Posts feed, and compare that with my FeedBurner Summary Posts feed. Alternately, you can have a pair of "summary" feeds, to let you compare email summary distribution options.

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