I am using Yahoo Pipes to create a grouping of feeds and a single output to RSS.   To keep things tidy, I send the output to Feedburner.  The challenge I’ve had is that Feedburner doesn’t appear to have an updating frequency – it waits for the feed output to change.

What this means is that sometimes my feed wasn’t updating for days, even though the feeds had updated.  I needed a solution to the problem, a solution that would force feedburner to check the Pipes output for any new feed items.

I decided to solve this problem by setting up a CRON job on my server.  Immediately I hear some of you asking “What is a CRON job?”

The best definition is probably Wikipedia [link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cron] “CRON is a time-based job schedule in Unix-like operating systems.  CRON allows users to schedule commands to run periodically at certain times or dates.  It is commonly used to automate system maintenance or administrate, though it’s general purpose nature means that it can be used for other purposes.”

Essentially, by setting up a CRON job, my server will take-on the task of pinging Feedburner on my behalf, and doing it at the interval I set.

So how to do it…

The first thing you’ll need is the output URL from a Feedburner Ping.  It’s the URL of the Ping Successful notice after you have pinged your address in feedburner.

It’s important to recognise that you should not ping your feed any more often than every 30 minutes.  I’d recommend a frequency of every two hours should be sufficient and allows for manual pings in the intervening period.

Next you need to login to your hosting – in Dreamhost the CRON function is found under Goodies > CRON jobs.

You can read into the working of CRON or just use my example as a guide.  This will run the CRON job every two hours, every day of the year.

0 */2 * * * -wget [URL]

(dont’ forget to substitute [URL] with your feedburner output)

When done your CRON job will look something like this:

0 */2 * * * -wget http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/pingSubmit?bloglink=http%3A%2F%2Ffeeds.feedburner.com%YourFeeedName

Feedburner’s free.

It’s easy to use.

And you’ll be left wondering why you haven’t done it before now.

So it’s likely you’re reading this because of my other WordPress posts. WordPress is an awesome blogging platform that’s really easy to use. And it also generates RSS feeds for your posts – and this is what you need.

I am not ashamed to say that I adore WordPress, but I also realise you may be using something else. Even if you’re not using WordPress, you can use these tips so long as your blog has an RSS feed.

So what’s this Feedburner thing?

Feedburner is an essential tool in your blog toolkit, and it does 3 things very well:

Firstly, it protects your RSS feed so that if you change your website address or your feed, you can take all your readers with you. Think about what would happen if you forgot to renew your domain name and someone else bought it.

Without feedburner your subscribers would be subscribed to the feed a your OLD domain. If you use Feedburner, all your subscribers subscribe to your feedburner feed – something like http://feeds.feedburner.com/YourFeedName. If you lose your domain name, all you do is tell Feedburner your new website feed address, and all your subscribers are back with you.

It’s a life saver!

Secondly – and a really important feature – is that it has a whole series of tools to measure the level of interest in your blog, and tell you how many people are reading.

It gives you a reason to keep on blogging.

Thirdly – and this is what I want to share with you today, is a little known feature that allows you to turn your Feedburner feed into a mailing list, so that each time you publish a blog post, each of your subscribers gets a copy of that post in their inbox. It’s a great feature, and it means that people don’t have to be on your website to get your blog post.

So how does it work?

The first step is to ‘burn’ your blog RSS as a feedburner feed. To do this – and it’s very easy to do – you need to visit Feedburner.com and sign in with a Google account. If you have a gmail account already you can use this login.

Next – you copy the RSS feed from your blog and paste it in the field below where it says “Burn a feed right this instant”, and click the Next button.

Once your feed is burned, you need to go to the Publish tab, and choose Email Subscriptions.

To put a form on your website, so that people can subscribe, you need to copy and paste one of the pieces of code on this page. You don’t really need to change any settings, but it is worth knowing which of the two pieces of code to copy.

The first set of code, creates a subscription box on your website. The second piece of code generates a link where people add their email address. If you know how to modify HTML code, you can jazz these up nicely, like they’ve done on the Copyblogger website for example.

The last thing you need to do is Activate the service, by clicking the button on the bottom of the page.

Once you’ve got the code in your site, you can invite your subscribers to subscribe at the bottom of every blog post. Once your subscribers grow you’ll have an awesome list of people to stay in contact with.

Have you got a question about Feedburner or WordPress you’d like me to cover in a blog? If you do, leave me a comment here. I’m going to be creating a series of tips for making technology like Feedburner and WordPress work for you, why don’t you subscribe to my newsletter and get the updates.