Having a tech background and understanding what goes into some software upgrade processes I was a little bit worried. I mean there are companies out there still using Internet Explorer 6, even with all of the pleading from internet companies to upgrade, and Office 2000 because of the trouble involved with upgrading software.

I finally took the plunge a couple days ago and, wow, was it easy. WordPress provides a helpful page in their thorough documentation and the steps are easy to follow. I first made a backup of my WordPress database and saved it to my local machine, which took all of one click through the CPanel admin tool provided by my hosting company. I went into WordPress and disabled all of my plugins, which was again, one click. And I went to the upgrade page in the WordPress Admin and, yes, one click more automatically upgraded WordPress to the new version (taking all of about 2 seconds to finish). Three clicks and I was done!

I went back and turned on my plugins, did a quick check of the blog, and everything was finished. Perhaps I am lucky because I have a new blog and only use a few of the most popular plugins. Nevertheless, color me impressed with the WordPress upgrade process.

Fortunately, there is a feature provided by Feedburner called MyBrand that lets blog publishers do just that. It’s relatively simple to setup for a wordpress.org blog, but I ran into a couple issues so I thought I’d put together this post to help others who want to do the same thing.

Note: This post assumes that you’ve already setup your blog and created your Feedburner feed. If you haven’t created a blog there are a ton of options out there. Since this blog runs on the WordPress platform and the blog post is about how to setup MyBrand on a WordPress blog, I recommend WordPress. If you already have a blog but need to setup your Feedburner feed there are Quick Start Guides provided by Feedburner for the most popular blogging platforms.

Activating MyBrand

The MyBrand feature within Feedburner is an account level feature, not a per-feed feature. However, even if you have multiple blogs/feeds being “burned” within a single Feedburner account you can still configure each blog independently.

Within Feedburner click on “My Account” in the top right of the page. In the left hand navigation of the My Account page click on the  link for MyBrand. There you should see the three step process describing how to setup and activate the MyBrand feature.

Step 1 – Create CNAME within DNS

To be able to use the MyBrand feature you must be able to create a CNAME within your DNS. This functionality is available through most hosting providers and is certainly available if you are hosting the blog yourself. However, if the blogging platform is hosting the blog for you, i.e. wordpress.com, blogspot.com, you may not be able to setup MyBrand.

A CNAME basically creates a subdomain for your website that, in reality, lives at a completely different domain. For example, I have two CNAMEs currently for sienno.com, one for redirecting email.sienno.com to my Google Apps Gmail account and one for redirecting feeds.sienno.com to Feedburner.

On the Feedburner MyBrand page you should see the following information:

Use the unique Google URL shown on your own Feedburner page as the destination for your new CNAME record

You don’t have to use the subdomain, feeds, for your CNAME, but in many cases it’s the most logical choice (and the one that I chose). The second part that you need is the Google URL that is the real destination for your CNAME. Make sure you use the URL that Google provides you and not the one I have shown in the image above since your URL may differ from mine.

Don’t try to go to your CNAME quite yet. You need to complete the steps to activate MyBrand first.

Step 2 – Enter Your Feed Domain

This part is simple but helps to show how MyBrand is an account level feature and not a feed level feature. In Step 2 you’ll see:

All you need to do here is enter your CNAME + your domain name into the text box. As you can see, for this blog, it is feeds.sienno.com since feeds is the CNAME I chose. If you wanted to have your other burned feeds also use MyBrand and the blogs were on separate domains you would have multiple domains entered here, one for each burned feed.

Step 3 – Activate MyBrand

Once you have created your CNAME and entered your feed domain you can click the button to activate MyBrand. Initially MyBrand should be inactive:

But with one click of the “Activate” button you should see

Great! MyBrand is activated. But, wait. You’re not done yet. You still need to update your WordPress blog to send users to your new burned feed.

Redirecting Users to Your Feedburner Feed

Once you have MyBrand activated you need a way to redirect the links on your WordPress blog to your new feed URL. You could, of course, manually modify the links but that is not the best way to go about it, especially if you’re using a 3rd party WordPress theme and do not want to change the code.

Feedburner has a WordPress plugin, Feedsmith, that can be downloaded and installed. However, the documentation states that it is only compatible up through WordPress 2.5 and WordPress 3.0 is already out! So I looked for an alternative. Fortunately, there is a free WordPress plugin created by John Watson named FD Feedburner that is compatible with both of the most recent versions of WordPress, 2.9.2 and 3.0.

After downloading, installing, and activating the FD Feedburner Plugin you can reach its settings by going to Plugins -> Feedburner Configuration. There you will see this screen:

The field you need to fill in is the one labeled, Redirect my fields here. This is the one issue that I ran into when setting up MyBrand and the redirect. Initially, I put http://feeds.sienno.com/ into the text box but whenever I would click on the RSS link on the blog home page I would end up at the Feedburner home page and not at my RSS feed within Feedburner. So I went to Feedburner and looked at the details of my Feedburner feed. You can view these details by clicking on your feed within Feedburner and then clicking Edit Feed Details…

You’ll notice that my Feedburner feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/Sienno. The “Sienno” part is the important part here. What you need to do to get MyBrand working correctly is to include the path to your Feedburner feed in the URL that you put into the FD Feedburner configuration page within WordPress. For example, the URL that is used for this blog to direct people to my Feedburner RSS feed is:

http://feeds.sienno.com/sienno

As soon as I made that change everything started to work. You’ll notice a couple things on this blog as a result of this configuration:

• When you click on the RSS feed icon on the blog you end up on Feedburner’s site and can easily subscribe to the blog feed.
• When a user subscribes to the blog feed, the URL for the feed is the MyBrand URL; in this case, http://feeds.sienno.com/sienno. This is great because, as I stated at the top, if I ever switch from Feedburner to another feed management tool I don’t need to change my feed URL and risk losing subscribers.
• The URL that appears when a user hovers over the RSS icon link on the blog is still http://www.sienno.com/feed/ and not http://feeds.sienno.com/sienno/. This is because of how the FD Feedburner plugin works. It redirects to the new URL after the user clicks on the link. Ideally, I’d like the link on the page to show the new URL and not risk confusing the user, but it’s a minimal issue and not one I’m going to worry about at this time.

Hopefully this post helps you quickly implement the Feedburner MyBrand feature on your WordPress blog and eliminates any stumbling blocks. If you run into any issues following the steps above, let me know so I can clear up any confusion or correct any mistakes for future readers!

One thing I wanted to do after the blog was up and running was investigate services like Feedburner for the blog’s RSS feed. I didn’t necessarily need Feedburner. WordPress automatically provides both an RSS and an Atom feed that I could give subscribers directly, but services like Feedburner provides additional features such as:

• Analytic information such as subscriber counts and locations
• Feed customizations – For example, allowing people to share on social media sites like Facebook and Twitter or social bookmarking sites like Delicious directly from their RSS reader
• Monetize your feed through advertising within the feed

I knew about Feedburner going into this since I have a couple personal blogs that utilize Feedburner, but I wanted to see what else was out there. It turns out that there are not that many other (good) choices. I found a couple people that talked about alternatives in their blogs including:

• iElectrify - 4 Must See Feedburner Alternatives For Your Blog
• Designussion - 7 of the Best Feedburner Alternatives

I looked pretty closely at Feedblitz and while I liked what I saw it costs money to get the RSS feed management piece unless you’re already paying for their email marketing service. I’m quite a ways off from starting any email marketing so I ruled out Feedblitz. I haven’t checked out Feedity yet though I may do so since according to the two blog posts they offer a free version.

In the end I went with Feedburner, at least for now. I like that I can log in with my normal Google account and I like the additional features, all of which are provided for free. I know there are issues with subscriber counts fluctuating wildly and I realize that there is probably some motive to Google providing this service for free like there is with their other free services, but I was able to set up my feed within Feedburner quickly and utilize the free FD Feedburner Plugin for WordPress to redirect all my feed links to my new feed URL.

In my next post I’ll talk about how I setup the MyBrand feature within Feedburner so that if I ever change from Feedburner to another service like Feedity or  Feedblitz the link to my feed will stay the same.

Starting my search for a domain name I went to GoDaddy. GoDaddy has reasonable fees for domains ($10.69/yr at the time of this post) versus some other major registrars like Network Solutions ($34.99 for 1 year). The trick with domain names is to creative but not too crazy. I recommend the following things when choosing a domain:

• If you use real words use their real spellings – Buying a domain like etoyz.com is a nice, short domain, but you will have to make sure that everyone puts a “z” and not a “s” in the domain name or all you will end up doing is sending people to etoys.com.
• If you use fake words don’t offend – This is something I made sure to avoid when choosing this domain, sienno.com. Like the famous, now debunked, legend of the Chevy Nova that supposedly sold poorly because “No va” in Spanish means “No go” you don’t want to pick a name that means something offensive in another language. The nice part about fake words is that you may be able to find a short URL that is still available. However, you still want to find something that is easy to say and spell. Sienno.com wouldn’t be nearly as easy to tell people about if it was instead something like ashredf.com.
• Avoid non-alpha characters – I am a firm believer that sticking with only letters (a-z) in a domain name is your best option. You can include a number (1-9) but if you are not a well known, established company you’ll run into the same issue I mentioned in the previous bullet point. You’ll have to tell everyone to visit my3dogs.com and not mythreedogs.com. I’m also not a big believer in putting symbols like hyphens in URLs. Again, don’t make it difficult for people to know how to get to your website.
• Keep it short, smartie (my own version of KISS) – Short domain names aren’t easy to find, especially if you want to use, real English words (see my note above in regards to using fake words). If you can’t find a single word domain for your site you should try to find a multiple word phrase. However, try to find something that isn’t a mouthful. The domain “buytoysgamesandmorehere.com” is probably available but no one is going to remember that. Find something that is 2-3 words max to make it memorable.
• Get creative – People pay thousands of dollars to branding agencies to come up with a unique name for products, websites, and more. And I’m sure these companies do a great job…for a price. But I am a firm believer in the power of SEO and the ability to get your website found if you have the content that people are looking for. So think twice before hiring someone to come up with a name. If you have a product that people find interesting and you market it correctly, people will come.

In the end I chose what I think is a great name for my future e-commerce site. I’m not going to say what it is in this post but suffice it to say that it consists of two real words, with their real spellings, is relevant to what will be sold on the site, and will be easy for people to remember. Best of all it didn’t cost me anything more than a domain registration fee and a bit of my time.

In the last year I’ve found a new passion, e-commerce. I have worked in web development for many years but from 2002 through 2009 I had almost no projects that dealt with business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce websites. Finally, last year when I moved into my current position I had the ability to set some direction at the company and decided that e-commerce was an area where we had had success in the past and I thought we could build new experience around it in the present. Little did I know at the time that I would become so personally interested in it. Needless to say a year later and I am more interested in it than ever.

Over that time I’ve come to read a lot about e-commerce trends, technologies, and companies. I also started listening to the E-Commerce Developer and Practice E-Commerce podcasts and found that there are a lot of people like myself that either had a goal to create an e-commerce company or just happened to fall into in and really enjoy it. Not only that, some of these people had no experience in starting a business or web development when they got started and have still become quite successful. Those testimonials have encouraged me to try my hand at it.

As for starting from scratch, well, that’s the best way to learn in my opinion. Sure, I could go out and get a Prostores account, throw up some products, and see what happens (and that may still be the end result), but I wanted to combine my interest in e-commerce with my interest and expertise in web development to see how far I can go in building my own e-commerce platform. Another theme that I heard during multiple podcasts was around people who decided that the carts and platforms on the market didn’t suit their needs and so they went out and built their own. What better way to have complete knowledge of a platform and complete control over its features than to build it yourself?!

Time will tell whether I am biting off more than I can chew but that’s what this whole experiment is about: experimenting, learning, revising, pursuing. Regardless of the result I will be proud of the attempt.