FeedBurner Adopts Two-Year-Old, Renames it 'FeedSmith'

t's official. We've signed adoption papers for the popular WordPress plugin that seamlessly redirects requests for an ordinary feed (from self-hosted WordPress blogs) to your super-powered FeedBurner feed. This plugin — a toddler in age, but a prodigy with HTTP requests — will be made available directly from FeedBurner as "FeedSmith." It was originally raised by the multi-talented Steve Smith, who's trusting us to ensure its continued well-being.

If you aren't already familiar with this handy plugin, you should know it's a reliable way to track your entire feed-reading audience and can even result in that elusive "bump in subscribers" effect when you first activate it. What the plugin accomplishes, in Steve's own words:

Using some WordPress plugin magic, and user-agent detection, this plugin simply forwards all your feed traffic to FeedBurner. The plugin will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/feed/ or http://www.yoursite.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed so you can track every possible subscriber. It will forward for your main posts feed, and optionally your main comments feed as well.

An older version used to require changes to your Apache server's .htaccess fille; the current version has no such requirements so it will work with any permalink structure you might use. Not only that, FeedSmith is compatible with WordPress versions 2.x and 1.5. In other words, it should work for pretty much everyone who uses a self-hosted WordPress installation. (If you are currently using Steve Smith's original "Ordered List FeedBurner plugin" and it is working to your satisfaction, you do not need to upgrade or switch, but keep in mind any new versions of this plugin will be available directly from FeedBurner in the future.)