blogio blogging blog

I recently helped David, who runs a nice recipe site at ChefPla.com, setting up his blog feeds with FeedBurner. The problem with his rss feed was the lack of reporting available in standard website statistics software. When using something like AwStats, which is what most hosting companies provide, you can only see the number of hits on your rss feed. FeedBurner provides a little more insight in how your rss feed is being used.

David noticed some issues with his rss feeds. I thought I’d share my response here with you. Here’s part of the e-mail I received from David:

…
There are a couple of issues I have noticed with the rss feed.

• The number of subscribers is below 10 still, but it fluctuates from day to day so I do wonder how accurate the information is.

…

The fluctuating subscriber numbers in FeedBurner are easy to explain: the provided subscriber count is simply the number of people who have accessed your rss feed on any given day. This might come as a shock to some of you, but not everyone is on the internet every day. So, a rss feed subscriber count of ten, two days in a row, could mean you have 10 subscribers. But it is also quite possible that the ten people who accessed your rss feed on day one are not online the second day. Ten other people might have accessed your feed on the second day, bringing your total subscribers count to 20 people.

The problem with accurately tracking the subscriber count is the limited information available to the feed provider. The only things we can track are the software used to read the feed (although, as pretty much any information send over the internet, this can be faked) and the ip address of the computer accessing the feed. I don’t think there is something similar to the cookies used in browsers in use in feed reader software, and even if there is: this would still not guarantee a 100% reliable way of tracking subscribers. I think the service provided by FeedBurner is as close to reliable subscriber tracking as you can get.

But even if we know that the reported subscriber numbers aren’t very accurate, we can use the reporting available to look at the bigger picture. Over time, if you are doing it right, you should see a general upward trend in the reported subscriber numbers.

Search engines have their bots roaming the internet, looking for new and changed website pages. There’s no telling when the bots will visit your site and indexing new pages on your site can take anywhere from minutes to days or even weeks.

If you’re running a blog and people have subscribed to your rss feed, you’ll want to let them know immediately when you have posted new content. The rss services, however, also rely on checking your site to see if new content has been posted. Checking every blog every minute of the day would be a big burden, both on their servers, as well as on the one hosting your blog.

This is where ping comes in: by pinging a service, you let it know that you have updated your site and it should come over to see what has changed. (not to be confused with the tcp/ip ping command, which tests the connection between two systems)

Within the WordPress admin panel you can find Update Services under Settings -> Writing. Here you can type in the URLs of the services to ping, whenever you post something new to your blog.

There are loads of ping services available, but be careful! Don’t just put every ping service you can find in there. Services like pingomatic will forward your ping to multiple other ping services. This will cause multiple pings, both from you and from pingomatic, to the same service. With multiple pings coming in for a single post, your blog could be marked as spam!

Here’s the list of ping services I’ve put into my WordPress installations:

http://rpc.pingomatic.com

http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/

WordPress is a great software package. One of its greatest features is the plugin engine that enables programmers to easily add new functionalities or change existing ones. Many people have created great plugins, so you don’t have to. Currently there are over 3400 plugins listed in the WordPress plugin directory and many more plugins are available on the authors websites.

Here are some of my favorite plugins:

Akismet
The ultimate comment-spam buster! If I could only use a single plugin, this would be the one. Akismet protects your blog from comment spammers that put links to all sorts of nasty websites in your post comments. Without Akismet you will be spending a lot of time digging thru the spam comments. All you need to do to activate the Akismet plugin is get a free API key from the WordPress site. The plugin itself doesn’t need installing as it comes bundled with the WordPress installation.

All in one SEO pack
WordPress is not fully optimized for the search engines, but that changes after installing the all in one SEO pack. This plugin gives you full control over page titles, meta tags and keywords.

Broken link checker
Whenever you put links into your posts, there is a chance that you will have broken links on your site in the future. This plugin checks all your outgoing links and lets you know if any of them are not working any more.

do-follow
Get rid of the no-follow attribute, because it doesn’t help.

feedburner feedsmith
If you want to be able to track your rss subscriber numbers, I suggest you sign up for a free account at feedburner. Once you have your feedburner account, you’ll need to change your rss feed links to point to the feedburner feed. “Where are the rss feed links located that need changing?” you might ask. That’s where this plugin comes in: install, activate and put your feedburner feed URL in the config screen.

no self pings
This plugin prevents pingbacks from showing when linking back to your own posts.

share this
A nice little button to enable visitors to submit your blog post to various social bookmarking sites or send an e-mail to friends.

top commentators
Say “thank you” to your top commentators by giving them a side wide link.

wordpress automatic upgrade
Upgrade your WordPress installation to the latest release from within the admin panel. Upgrading this way saves a lot of worries and time.

wp-cumulus
A beautiful flash tag-cloud to spice up your blog. This is probably not helping with SEO, but it looks awesome!

There are many more great WordPress plugins available, but these are some that I really like. Oh hold on, I almost forgot to mention the best plugin of them all: my very own ad buttons plugin! Actually, it’s not that great yet, as it is still a work in progress, but feel free to download it and give it a try.

I don’t think I, or anybody else, has the time to give the thousands of plugins available on the WordPress site all a try. Do you know of some particularly good plugins, please let me know!