Feedburner

Feedburner is an excellent service for helping improve the performance and availability of your RSS feeds from your blogging software or other syndicate information. There are several usage for feedburning, including the translation of your feed into several formats (RSS/RSS2/ATOM/etc), caching, reporting and ad revenue. Since the acquisition of Feedburner by Google, you can now insert google ads into your RSS feeds to create a source of revenue from your RSS subscribers. As with the majority of Google services there are reporting services available to help you understand your reader base.

One area we discovered a huge improvement was over syndicating information on our own pages. We have been using an excellent PHP RSS aggregator to display information on our pages called MagpieRSS which reads our own RSS feeds and then displays select content on our pages. We were noticing a pretty big slowdown on the first page load as Magie created a cache, but subsequent loads were quick. We thought it was a problem with Magpie but when we redirected to our Feedburner feed instead of our native WordPress feed, the performance was about 5 times faster.