After writing the following, Eric Olson from FeedBurner responded saying that the FeedBurner Plugin covers autodiscovery too, so there is no need to hack your header.php file to make sure that news readers are automatically redirected to your FeedBurner feed. You can see his comment below.

I have diligently installed orderedlist’s FeedBurner Plugin in all blogs I have created so that we can all monitor our feed subscribers with FeedBurner. For some reason today, while I was looking at my FeedBurner stats, something didn’t seem quite right. I realized that I had never tested out autodiscovery on my feed.

So I did a test. I opened up Netvibes and entered the URL of my blogs to see what the autodiscovery picks up. Guess what – the WordPress default feeds were detected, not FeedBurner! Now I actually don’t know if this makes a difference, but one of FeedBurner’s forums has directions for making sure that the autodiscovery picks up the FeedBurner feed, which involves hacking your header.php file.

Do you have to make these changes to ensure that all feeds are redirected through FeedBurner? I don’t know. But I made the changes, and now when I did an autodiscovery test, it only picked up the FeedBurner feed.

So here are the changes you need to make:

  1. Look in your header.php file for code that looks like this:
    <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />
    You may find two or three code bits that are listed one after the other that resemble the above. Each one is dedicated to a different type of feed, like RSS 2.0, RSS .92, and Atom.
  2. Your code may have something else in between the quotation marks after href. Whatever appears in those quotation marks, which in this case is <?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>, replace with the link to your FeedBurner feed. So for example, for this site, we would enter http://feeds.feedburner.com/WordpressGarage.
  3. Save and upload the file.

Now autodiscovery will only find your FeedBurner feed link.