Perhaps could have worded the title better, but it gets the message across. I just switched over to Feedburner (used to use in-house methods) to see what all the fuss was about. So, joined up and claimed my feed. Not too bad. I admit, I had to do it about three times, as it never seemed to save my details. Great! Now what?

This is the point where most bloggers that don’t have a web developer at their disposal stumble. Great, I’ve got my shiny new Feedburner account, and decided to find a plugin, rather than scripting one myself. Took ages. Turns out, there’s always been a great plugin out there for it, but the great guys at Google Feedburner (yes, you heard me right, Google has somehow monetized RSS), have decided to accept it as their official plugin. Well, I thought, that sounds great! What could be better? That was when I realised that the trail of about 15 links to navigate to the thing had led me in a complete circle, back to the Ordered List blog (original developers). Probably room for improvement there.

When I finally got it installed and working, the worst news to hear after a good 45 minute scramble around links is that my time may have been wasted after all. Half of the modern aggregators there, including the well-known, stable aggregators, like my Windows Live Mail, don’t accept it as a valid feed. Works perfectly with Ti’s existing feed, just won’t accept Feedburner’s. If you’ve stumbled across this article - take a peek at the feeds, and let me know if it works for you. All it takes is a quick comment! Any feedback would be much appreciated.

Now, the UI, unarguably the worst part of Feedburner. It really does remind me of pre-CSS (2001) styling. The homepage, and virtually everything other than the top navigation (Home, My Feeds, My Account, Languages, Help etc.) is a mess. Don’t get me wrong. I’m a huge fan of Web 2.0, and apparently so are the designers, but you clearly don’t have to be good at something to be a fan. It’s got all of the elements of a masterpiece, and in fact it is a masterpiece, if you zoom in really, really, close. The only thing is that having that bright lilac/blue background, multicoloured ad in the sidebar, red table headings, green notices, blue links, orange logo. A certain technicolor dreamcoat springs to mind. It would be great, if they could fix that, along with other inconsistencies.

Overall, it’s an amazing service, with weeks of thought gone into the code, but it’s just peaking peaked. It can’t keep up with modern demands (or modern taste), the features aren’t growing. It’s made the classic Google mistake of over-monetization. Just look at YouTube’s partner scheme. So, I hear you asking, would I, you, me, Lawrence (too late for me here in the UK) recommend it? Yes! At this point, there is no alternative, and it’s a great tool to use. Having tried Mint, there’s no way to use it without damaging page-load time, or quite simply messing up the database this software runs on, so until a better alternative rises from the dust, I have no choice but to recommend Google’s most overvalued (sorry for the vocabulary/emotional outburst there) asset.

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Team Update: Welcoming Ahad Bokhari onto our team!