As a result of the acquisition of FeedBurner by Google, all current FeedBurner customers need to make changes to their accounts before the end of February. Here at The Conversations Network we use FeedBurner for our highest-volume feeds, and to insure long-term portability of those feeds we use DNS CNAME records so that the feeds appear to come from us. For example, feeds.conversations.org is defined by a DNS record to refer to a FeedBurner (now Google) server. RSS subscribers never see the difference.

FeedBurner’s support for CNAME’d feeds is called MyBrand and according to Google’s transition instructions (for logged-in customers), “FeedBurner provides no technical support for MyBrand.” But that page describes a procedure that simply doesn’t work. I consider myself moderately adroit with DNS, but even after experimenting on and off for a few hours, I was unsuccessful. It should have been quite simple, but no.

So I turned to The Google itself for help and found the solution on Tim Heuer’s blog. As Tim says, and contrary to what any reasonable person would expect, you first have to Disable the MyBrand service then re-Activate it. If you’ve modified your CNAME records properly and allowed them time to propagate, the fix is immediate.