How to migrate the RSS subscriber between Feedburner and Feedsky

Feedburner is the leading provider of media distribution and audience engagement services for blogs and RSS feeds. It was the most famous RSS feeds provider in the world. But before 2008, it’s not accessible for Chinese people as the GFW controled by China government. The Chinese bloggers who used Feedburner’s service were not able to distribute their articles through Feedburner. They had to find another way.

Feedsky is another RSS feeds provider which is hold by some Chinese. It provides the services which are mostly like Feedburner. And its servers are placed in China so it will not be effected by the GFW.

So many Chinese bloggers registered Feedsky accounts for distribution. I also registered an account at that time. But comparing with Feedsky, Feedburner provides much more services basing on RSS feeds field.

From Jan. 2008, Feedburner is available again. I’d like to change the RSS feeds provider back to Feedburner. But the question is, my blog subscribers have subscribed the feed which is hosted by Feedsky, how to migrate the RSS subscriber between Feedburner and Feedsky without losing anybody?

Now I find an approach. First, delete the CNAME of the feed subdomain name which is used to point Feedsky, then create an A record of that subdomain name to point to your own server, add this subdomain name to the host header, at last, create an index.asp as below.

<%
if Request.ServerVariables("SERVER_NAME")="feed.palfans.net"
then
   response.redirect("http://feeds2.feedburner.com/palfans")
end if
%>

We needn’t to announce the modification of the RSS feed provider. The subscribers could use feed.palfans.net permanently without caring about where the feed deposits with. Even Feedburner is banned by GFW again, I can only change the redirect target from Feedburner to Feedsky.

Now I have tested this approach for some while, it goes well. I think the only defect is that it is a little complex during configure the web site and the domain name.

Welcome back, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!