Jun 17

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. :)

May 16

Hey dude! Wordpress 2.2 is out now. As usual there are numbers of bug fixes and cool new features. The most notably feature which i love in this version is Widgets integration.

With this cool feature you don’t have to hardcode the widget’s script into your theme anymore, instead it can be installed and arranged using your administration panel. So you don’t have to worry when you need to change your theme, every widget will still show up as they were.

See, mybloglog widget on my sidebar? i put it there using this widget integration panel. All you need is to copy-paste the widget’s script into the text area in the widget panel. You can even arrange the position of the widget by drag n’ drop UI. Very nice!

Feb 17

180px-Mullenweg matt

Many of you use Wordpress as blogging platform, but only view of you might know who's the guy behind this popular web apps.

Matt Mullenweg is the founding developer of Wordpress. He is a young talented developer lives in San Fransisco, California. He writes a nice blog at photomatt.net which i believe the first wordpress blog in the world.

Edgework's Brian Oberkich talked to Matt in 49:30 minutes interview. You should listen to this. Matt talked about Wordpress, Akismet and the zen of web product development.

As many other open source project leader, Matt is a nice and wise guy. He knows very well how to manage team of developers, how and when to deliver product to the end users, including take an action of any feedback from them.

There's a part on that inteview where he shared a funny story behind Akismet, anti spam system for blogosphere. Some time before he released Akismet to public, his mom gave him a visit to San Fransisco and lived with him for five weeks. Until at certain point when she decided to make a blog of her own.

Worrying his mom would also get spams offering porn site and would think this as what her son's doing all the time, Matt pushed Akismet's team to make a release version as soon as possible. :-)