Why can’t they tell us about these things? Google, who bought FeedBurner in June of 2007, first changed the old FeedBurner feed address when they first “announced” AdSense for feeds around August of 2008. Funny how the majority of bloggers and AdSense users were surprised to find out about this–after the fact. So much for Google’s “announcement”.

Without getting into all the dirty details, the original FeedBurner feed address was eventually replaced with the following for those using ads in their feeds:

http://feedproxy.google.com/nameofblog/

For myself, once I went through the new AdSense for Feeds rigmarole, all I did was take my current (at the time) WordPress type FeedBurner plugin and change over the old FeedBurner feed address to the new AdSense ‘FeedBurner’ feed address as shown above. Since my original site feeds drove the ‘burned’ feed I didn’t lose any subscribers. Still, I was fairly miffed about the how lousy Google had handled this.

Obviously things at Google haven’t improved any. They changed the feed address again. Anybody hear about this one? It’s now been changed to this:

http://feeds2.feedburner.com/nameofblog/

Absolutely no public announcement about this that I could find. I only happened to stumble on to the change completely by chance when I found this AdSense blog article about the the upcoming February 28th deadline for transferring old FeedBurner feeds over to the new Google version of FeedBurner (also not announced anywhere in the news). And it wasn’t the article itself but the comment below that sent me off on the hunt.

If you do not have a Gmail account, that is your first step.
Then you will find a Feed Burner button on your Google dashboard. Try moving the feeds from there.
Once it is moved the feed changes:
http://feeds2.feedburner.com/nameofblog
If you have Blogger blogs, you will find those on your dashboard. As well as analytics, adsense and adwords accounts.
Once you get everything moved, it works a little better.

Absolutely pitiful that I should have to find out this way.

I logged into my main Google account and checked my AdSense for Feeds details and sure enough, the feed address had indeed changed. FeedBurner itself was also listed as one of my services now in my Google account main page.

No announcement, nothing in the news, just a chance finding on my part. So I changed the codes in my Subscription text widget in my sidebar and the feed addresses in my current FeedBurner plugin and all the ‘burned’ feeds are working once again.

I’m even seeing ads in my feeds now? Apparently so since they now show up with my AdBlocker disabled. And checking my AdSense account shows me that I’ve several hundred impressions already from feed ads. Rather strange considering that AdSense for Feeds wasn’t supposed to start showing ads unless I had 500 or more subscribers–which I certainly do not.

What else did Google not announce?