Monitoring Your Feed Reader

There are two web stats i watch almost everyday to get to know who and how my visitors got to this blog, Google Analytics and Awstats. But none of them give the exact value of my feed reader, which is also important especially when you share feeds (most people read the feed using feed reader somewhere else instead visiting your website).

As you can see from my Awstats graph here that the most viewed URL in my blog is the feed,

feedstats

however i never know how many are they, cause it just shows you how many views and average size it got hits.

That’s why we need another tools for this. And my favourite one is FeedBurner (which was acquired by Google not long ago). Not only you can customize the look of your feed, you can also track the actual number of people reading your feed.

But the problem is when you use FeedBurner the URL for your feed must be changed. For example, my feed URL in FeedBurner is http://feeds.feedburner.com/NgoprekWeb. This is the problem since my feed URL by default is http://www.ngoprekweb.com/feed (i’m using wordpress). And people read my feed using this URL for months.

If you’re using wordpress and having the same problem like me, then here’s a little tips for you: use FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin for wordpress. This plugin will detect all ways to access your feed (e.g. http://www.yoursite.com/feed/ or http://www.yoursite.com/wp-rss2.php, etc.), and redirect them to your FeedBurner feed.

It also changes automatically the URL your old feed subscriber read into your FeedBurner feed. As you can see in my FeedBurner stats here, i finally got the real number of my feed subscribers after i installed the plugin,

feedBurnerStats

It’s an old trick, but it works for me. 🙂

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