The outsourcing of my weblog continues...

Posted on Monday, March 14th, 2005 2:31 PM

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So, in addition to using Bloglines as my aggregator and the source of my Favorites page, I just implemented a redirect for my feeds to FeedBurner (Justin's post spurred me to finally make the switch) so I've outsourced that service as well. Since my site uses Paul Tuckey's URL Rewrite filter already, it was super-easy to just swap some URL mappings around (index.rss to FeedBurner's site, for example, instead of rss.jsp) and poof. Instant feed stats.

Now I know what's going on in my feeds. They've been "dark" for the past month since I stopped using Awstats. Not only are the feed and subscribers more transparent, the actual click throughs on all the links are as well. If you haven't checked out FeedBurner's UI and graphs, you should, it's very enlightening. I should see if I can get some text ads up and start making mon-ay too!

I wonder how many aggregators play nice with redirects? And I wonder what type of redirect URL Rewrite is sending. And I wonder how much of a PITA this will all be when moving to WordPress? Hmm. This should be interesting. We'll see how many complaints I get soon. ;-)

FeedBurner has a little icon you can put on your page to display the number of RSS readers you have - I've added it to my referrers page (which should probably be renamed "stats", actually). What I really want is that level of transparency that StatCounter provides (to which I'm a subscriber, now by the way. Now the last 1000 uniques IPs are tracked, not just the last 100). In fact, it'd be nice if *all* this stuff was in one spot, actually.

Tell me if you have any problems with the feeds.

-Russ

Update: Oops. It looks like a lot of readers were using the old rss.jsp page directly. So I've renamed the jsp and am now redirecting rss.jsp. Bloglines was one of those (and it hasn't updated yet. So we'll see if it (and other aggregators) doesn't barf on the redirecting. :-)

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