After being acquired by Google, Feedburner announced that they were offering Feedburner Pro Features for free to all its users. One of the interesting features was MyBrand, a way to implement the feeds for your site to be accessible from a sub-domain of your own site instead of redirecting to Feedburner. And finally, I took the time to go ahead and implement MyBrand here!

Why MyBrand?

When you look at a particular feed’s address, you can tell me which looks better.

• http://feeds.feedburner.com/yoursite
• http://feeds.yoursite.com

Obviously the second option makes your site look a bit more professional indicating to visitors that you are managing your feeds, even if you aren’t actually doing so. And anyway, the process to implement MyBrand was quite simple and straightforward, so I didn’t mind wasting a few minutes doing it!

How to Implement MyBrand?

To implement MyBrand, you need to do the following:

At Feedburner

• Login to Feedburner
• Go to My Account area
• Go to MyBrand
• In the 3rd step, simply enter the subdomain on your site where you will your feeds to be present. If you want to host it at feeds.yoursite.com, then enter that without the http://

At Your WebHost

Most domain registrars do not offer the CName service unless you point your domain to their nameservers. So, you need to ask this service from your web host to whose site you are pointing the nameservers of your domain name. Most hosts do not allow CName changes to be done by yourself. So, you should send them a support ticket asking them to do the same.

The CName entry for your site should be set to feeds CNAME feeds.feedburner.com. The final dot may be essential as well. The first word should be feeds only if you are want the feed address to be at feeds.yoursite.com. If you want it to be elsewhere, simply use that sub-domain name here. e.g For it to be at myfeeds.yoursite.com, use myfeeds CNAME feeds.feedburner.com as the CName entry and save it. Do not forget to create a sub-domain called feeds using Cpanel.

The CName entry may take upto 24 hours to propagate, however the process lasted only a few minutes in my case. After this you’d be able to access your feeds at feeds.yoursite.com/yourfeed. As in my case, the feeds are at feeds.siteguide.us/siteguide.

How it Works?

CName is nothing but an alias for a domain name or sub-domain. Basically when you set the CName of a subdomain to another domain name, the subdomain would point to the other domain name. Here, the subdomain feeds.siteguide.us points to feeds.feedburner.com.

Remember, my feeds are actually located at feeds.feedburner.com/siteguide. After applying the CName, the sub-domain name feeds.siteguide.us will behave like feeds.feedburner.com. So, any feed at feeds.feedburner.com can be accessed via your site as well.

Also, you will most certainly not lose any of your earlier subscribers who have subscribed through feed readers or by email. They’ll still continue to get the same feed since this address acts as a redirect to the original feed which will still be located at feedburner. So, you can go ahead and use this without any worries. Thanks to Keith for mentioning this!

The reason you can’t place your feed at feeds.yoursite.com itself is because you may have more than one feed for the same domain. For e.g there may be feeds for the categories, individual posts, comments and so on.

If you have any queries regarding the article, do feel free to ask me. How many of you have already implemented MyBrand on your site? Do let me know in the comments!

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