Feedburner is the devil. When I first started this blog back in 2006 I decided to run the RSS feed through Feedburner. I have no memory of why I did that or what advantage I thought I was gaining. I suspect it provided a way for me to see who was subscribed, number of subscribers, that sort of thing. Whatever the case, that decision continues to haunt me.
Feedburner is now some sort of shell of its former self. You can log in, but there’s basically nothing there. The problem is that Feedburner will not stop redirecting my feed in a way that makes it completely unusable. If you try to open the RSS feed for this blog, you’ll get a 404 error. The feed should be at theimbroglio.com/feed, but when you go there, it redirects immediately to http://feeds.feedburner.com/theimbroglio, which gives a 404 error.
I have tried to fix this a dozen times over the years without success. Days ago I was able to login to Feedburner and delete the “proxies” there, but nothing changed. How can I make Feedburner release my feed?
I suspect if I put the whole WordPress install in a new directory, the feed would work again. Maybe. I have resisted doing that, but perhaps that’s the only answer.
There may be little consensus on the definition of a blog, but one thing I know: You don’t have a blog without an RSS feed. Right now, I don’t have a blog and I haven’t had one for years at least in part because of Feedburner. How can I make it die!?!?
Update: My latest effort to wrest my RSS feed away from Feedburner was to follow this tutorial to create a custom RSS feed. My hope was a second RSS feed would not get hijacked by feedburner, but, alas, the same thing happens — the new feed redirects to Feedburner and returns a 404. Damn. (Of note: I used ChatGPT to troubleshoot the code when a direct copy from the tutorial produced an error. ChatGPT fixed the errors and what I copy/pasted from ChatGPT worked like a charm. It’s indistinguishable from magic for stuff like this.)