Monday, July 16, 2007

Feedburning

I've always suspected Planethalder of having far more RSS feed reader visitors than website visitors. I read all my blogs via Google Reader (even via the mobile phone) and if a blog doesn't have a feed, or if it doesn't have "full text" enabled within its feed, then I'm unlikely to read. Normal website statistics packages, including Sitemeter and Google Analytics, do not count RSS feed visits in their totals. So I've started redirecting my Blogger feed to FeedBurner, which tracks a variety of feed statistics such as how many subscribers you have, how many hits your feeds are getting per day, what posts are the most popular. The service, which is now Google-owned, is completely free. If you subscribe to my site, you shouldn't have to change anything - the usual Blogger feed you subscribed via should simply auto-redirect to FeedBurner everytime you read via RSS. It'll be interesting to see what the feed statistics show.

If you are on Blogger and want to do something similar then visit the Quick Start For Blogger page on FeedBurner. Here are the processes for WordPress and Typepad blogs - I think the auto-redirects from your existing to your new FeedBurner feeds work the same way.

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