Migrating Feedburner to Google? Read this first

Today was the day that the ‘do no evil’ guys at Google screwed me over! I logged into feedburner today and got an ‘ever so loving’ message on the feedburner website instructing me to migrate my feeds.

No users should be lost in the migration process, the message promised. I can’t tell you what else because they immediately locked me out of my old feedburner account as part of the migration process.

What wasn’t clear to me as I skimmed the message was that MyBrand sites (where you substitute your own domain for the feedburner.com domain) would be affected in the change.

I didn’t discover until the ‘successful’ migration message from Google, that I needed to manage the CNAME changes with my domain. A process that can take up to 48 hours. That would possibly mean for some users utilising MyBrand feeds that their feeds could be taken out for 2 whole days.

I didn’t think this would be a problem as I am with DomainSite and I know that the setup initially took only 3 minutes to propagate.

So I dutifully made my CNAME changes as Google instructed, only to get 404 errors from the migrated google site.

All my podcast and blog feeds (some 30 of them were now down).

Going through the process, and getting customer complaints by the minute, I eventually realised that the 404 error was coming from the Google servers. It appeared that Google hadn’t migrated the MyBrand details to the new location.

In order to get around this problem I had to deactivate the MyBrand service and reactivate it, and immediately all my feeds started working again.

Google’s instructions, as far as I can tell, were deficient and did not advise customers of this significant issue. Hopefully this blog post will help others who find themselves in trouble from this ‘seemless’ transition to the new platform.

Google hope to migrate all customers from Feedburner to the Google platform by February 28, 2009.

ADDITIONAL NOTES: If you’re still having problems, you might want to check out Tim Heuer’s step by step instructions on his blog here. It’s a great article, and comprehensive in the steps required.


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2 Responses to “Migrating Feedburner to Google? Read this first”

  1. If you deactivate and reactivate but you still receive the 404 errors, what should you do?

    by TestBlogger
    on 30. Jan, 2009

  2. Tim Heuer has a more detailed post about the whole process, including exactly how to do these steps – check out his post here,

    http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/01/23/feedburner-move-google-mybrand-404-error.aspx

    and then I guess if all fails you may need to ditch your MyBrand and revert to feeds.feedburner.com until it’s sorted by Google.

    You may however, find some joy in Tim’s post, which is quite detailed.

    by James Williams
    on 30. Jan, 2009

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