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/

If you are blogging on a specific subject, you probably look at other blogs within your niche, and you should. Following other blogs is a good way of keeping up with industry specific news and it can give you ideas for new posts on your own blog. Keeping up with what others are writing can be a very time-consuming task though. You don’t know when other blogs post new content, so to really stay on top of things, you’d have to visit each site a couple of time a day to check.

There’s a better way though, say hello to our friend the rss feed. If you are blogging, there’s no doubt that you have seen this term before, about every blogging platform has rss feeds integrated into the software. Still many beginning bloggers don’t know what an rss feed is or how to use it. The rss feed is the best thing since sliced bread!

The rapid rise of blogs, and rss feeds, only a few years ago, might make you believe that rss is one of the hip inventions of the 21st century. Truth is, that the technique has been around since the 1960’s. Like most things computer related, rss’ roots lie at IBM. But let me not bore you with a history lesson, nor the technical details of the rss feed. Let’s just take it’s working for granted and see how we can make use of it.

Without getting into the technical details, let me quickly give you an idea of what an rss feed is. Simply put, the rss feed makes the content of a website available in a standard way. The key word here is content, the feed doesn’t contain the layout of the website or the ads you see when visiting the site, although ads can be integrated into rss feeds as well. An rss reader can read the contents of multiple rss feeds and display them to you. This way you can keep track of new posts on multiple blogs from within a single web page or application.

If you want to know which rss reader is best for you, I’m not the one to ask. There are many readers available, online applications as well as stand-alone programs. I use Google reader but similar services are available at other sites. I prefer the online rss reader because it enables me to access my feeds from any computer with an internet connection.

The Google reader serves my needs, so I have not tried other applications yet. If you want to see some other rss readers available, Life Hacker posted a list of their visitors favorite rss readers a while ago and Daren has also asked his visitors what they use.