I just saw that Steve Rubel switched to Feedburner after reading about my experience and I realized I had not mentioned what I had done in making the switch to retain existing subscribers while picking up new ones through the new feed URI. Here’s the skinny from what I did earlier in the week so anyone else interested can take advantage of the same tricks… It was actually quite simple.
I found a few posts on the Feedburner blog which made it all possible.
The great thing about Feedburner from a user perspective is that it’s simple. You the reader no longer have to make a syndication selection (Atom vs. Flavor of RSS) and I the publisher can make universal changes from the control panel which automatically go into effect. There is no editing of code, period.
Following the info on the two links above, I was able to change all my autodiscovery links (they are in your HTML header) to all point to the same Feedburner URl. I then used a simple redirect in my .htaccess and was off. Within 24 hours I had and continue to have some nice stats to complement the sitemeter web access info I check regularly.