Tag Archive for 'FeedBurner'

FeedBurner Part 1: Setup and Analyze your feed

Published
by
Chalupa
on February 18, 2008
in Getting Started
. 0 Comments

In my first post, I installed Wordpress, now what?, I mentioned FeedBurner as a good tool for RSS feeds. I haven’t used other RSS tools for Wordpress so let us know if you have any other suggestions. Besides being able to see statistics on your feed, FeedBurner also has some other nice features that are broken up into four categories: Analyze, Optimize, Monetize, and Publicize. As you can see by the post title, I’m going to be talking about the Analyze tab today.

For starters, setting up your feed is easy. First you’ll need to know the address for your auto-generated feed. Wordpress creates two: one for your posts and another for your comments. If I were you, I’d setup both because it’s not that hard and this way everything will be consistent. On your blog there should be links to your feeds. You can click on them to get the address or right-click and copy the address. Now that you have the address you can setup the feed at FeedBurner.com. On the homepage there’s an area to paste/type in the address for your feed. From here you hit the Next button and you’ll have a few more options. I’m not going to write about those because FeedBurner has excellent help for that kind of stuff. After you have things setup for your post feed you can then repeat for your comment feed.

Next time you’ll login to FeedBurner you’ll have a dashboard, called My Feeds, with your two new feeds showing up. Click on one of them and you’ll be under the Analyze tab. This is where you can view all of your statistics. You can view stats on your Feed, Site and Headline Animators. For your feed you can track item views, item link clicks, and item enclosure downloads. The last one is mostly for podcast episodes, which we’ll eventually get to. The feed stats are already setup, but it’ll take a little extra work for site stats, and headline animators can be configured under the Publicize tab.

Your feed stats will track subscribers, hits, item uses, and uncommon uses. A subscriber is defined as somebody checking your feed through a feed reader on a given day. If you have 20 subscribers on Monday and 15 on Tuesday, this doesn’t mean you have 35 total. This just means 20 people checked it on Monday and on Tuesday some of them had their computers off, didn’t open their reader, etc. You can look at your stats by yesterday, past 7 days, past 30 days and all time. You do get to see trends over time, but you’re not able to look at specific day more than a month back. This is a drawback, but hey, you’re using a free service.

If you already have a statistics tool setup or are going to set one up, you might not want to use FeedBurner’s service. You almost always get conflicting numbers for hits, unique hits, etc. This has to do with time zones and the different algorithms and criteria the software is programed to use. It can get confusing trying to work off of two different statistics tools.

After you look through some of the initial options and make your choices, you should start seeing some stats in the next day or two, if people are subscribed. One last thing you need to do to make sure people are using your FeedBurner feed and not your old feed. You could go to all the trouble of tracking down those links in your template, or you could use the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin.

FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin

Published
by
Chalupa
on February 18, 2008
in Administration and Organization and Other Software for Bloggers
. 1 Comment

If you’re using FeedBurner for your feeds, and I highly recommend you do, you can easily re-direct your feed links from your self-hosted Wordpress blog to Feedburner using the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin. Yeah, so that’s a mouthful. After you download, upload, and activate this plugin there are just a few things left to do.

1.) You’ll need to already have your FeedBurner account setup. You could do this afterwards, but you’ll need this information for configuration.

2.) If you’d like FeedBurner to handle the feeds for both your posts/entries and your comments, you’ll need to setup two feeds - one for each.

3.) Go to your Options menu in Wordpress and there should be a submenu called FeedBurner. This is where you’ll enter your feed new FeedBurner feed URLs you just created.

4.) Last step is to test this out. Most templates/themes have links on them somewhere for your built-in RSS feeds. Test them out. If they don’t work I’d suggest trying them in ten minutes. If they still don’t work go back and check your spelling. That’s usually my most common mistake.

Well that pretty much covers setting up this plugin. There will be more posts in the near future describing some of the features you’ll find useful, or may want to check out, in FeedBurner.

I installed Wordpress, now what?

Published
by
Chalupa
on February 12, 2008
in Getting Started
. 2 Comments

So you’ve bought a domain name, installed your Wordpress blog, and now you’re wondering what to do. Well, look no further because I’m about to tell you the things you should be thinking about.

Whenever I play around with technology I usually do a little research, play around with it, and then jump in headfirst. Over the past few years of blogging, there are a few things I’ve learned that would have been better being setup from the very beginning.

#1 Statistics
“What’s that?” you say. “Stats? I hated that class!” Well, you won’t have to get out your calculator or calculate any r values. What we’re talking about here is finding out if people are coming to your blog, what posts are popular, what are people searching for to find your blog, what links were clicked to get to your blog, etc, etc.

Feeling a little bit better about this topic? I thought you would. I have tried out about 5-10 different stats packages, that are free, for blogging. They have all been a little bit different and offer some different types of information. One thing to point out is if you have multiple stats packages installed, you’re probably going to get different numbers for the amount of hits (both total and unique), referring links, time on site, etc. The reason for this is because it depends on how long it waits before counting a hit from the same IP as another unique hit. It also depends on the timezone it’s working off of, and many other technicalities. This is why I would suggest only using only one to avoid confusion.

One reason to set up your statistics immediately is that every day that goes by without a tool installed is another day you have no idea what kind of traffic your blog is seeing. I’m currently using Google Analytics and am really enjoying it. The biggest advantage to using this free tool is that you’re not limited to only seeing the most X recent hits. Most of the other free tools I’ve used have only allowed me to see the last 100 or 200 hits. This is great, but it cripples you from seeing any trends over time. The only thing I miss about Google Analytics is that even though I’m able to see a lot of different types of information, they aren’t sorted by specific hits. I can’t see that a particular person came to my site from a referring link, went to 8 pages, spent 3min on my site and then left. So you might want to consider what types of information you’re wanting to receive and how they’re sorted before picking a certain stats tool.

#2 RSS Feed
If you’re not familiar with what an RSS feed is, then you should look it up on Wikipedia or something. These aren’t so much the wave of the future, but the wave of the now. Almost every blog and website you go to will offer some type or types of RSS feeds to their users. These are then setup on RSS readers so somebody can see if new content has been posted without having to go visit their favorite site(s). This may not sound like a big deal if you check one or two sites a day, however, if 35 of your friends are infrequent bloggers and you’d like to keep up with all their blogs…that’s when an RSS reader starts to sound like a good idea.

Wordpress has automatic RSS generation features built right into it. The only drawback is you don’t get to choose how it looks or what’s included, you can’t see stats on who’s subscribed, etc. A good, free tool I’ve been using for all of my feeds is FeedBurner. FeedBurner was recently bought by Google so I don’t think there’s any danger of it disappearing any time soon. With this service you can add bells and whistles to your feed, customize it for podcasts, modify description and title, see how many people are subscribed, etc. There’s a lot of cool functionality which I will be discussing in a later post. There are also some very handy plugins that allow you to redirect your built-in Wordpress feed to use FeedBurner, which I will also be talking about in a later post.

#3 Ads
Advertisements are something I just started using and wish I had setup a long time ago. Some of my friends stay away from them because they see it as “whoring themselves out” or something that will “clutter up their site.’”This can very easily happen and is something to consider if and when choosing an ad service. I’ve been using Google Adsense for a few months now and highly recommend it. You’re able to choose the type, style and size of your ads. You’re able to blacklist specific ads from showing up. Most importantly, you’re also able to maybe make some money which could cover your domain name costs and maybe even your hosting costs.

#4 Spam
Spam is something I’m sure you seen in your mailbox. If you’re new to blogging, then you may not know that you can also get spam comments. Just like there are spam filters for mail, there are also spam filters for blog comments. Wordpress has some settings to help prevent this under Options…Discussion. You can prevent comments from showing immediately, blacklist people and even hold comments if they have too many links in them. This doesn’t always catch everything though.

One built-in plugin you’ll find is called Akismet. This is a pretty decent service that will try to catch some spam. The only catch is you have to have an API key to use it. You can easily get one of these free by creating an account at Wordpress.com. The only thing I don’t like about Akismet, and this might just be ignorance on my part, is that I’m not notified in any way if some suspected comments are being held for my approval. I have to login to my blog and check my Comments tab.

There are also many other free spam plugins you can check out and try. Always check out some of the specifications before you pick one. You’ll want to make sure you can manually “ok” a comment if it’s suspected of spam and that you’re able to manage the spam blocker/catcher in some way.

#5 Organization
I’m sure all of you have gotten tired of somebody telling you to clean up your room at some point in time. This is one of those things that may seem pointless to you and important to someone else at the exact same time. In the case of your blog, it’s good to consider your readers on this one because they’re the ones reading. If you’re creating a personal blog and don’t want anyone to read it, then maybe you can skip some organization. I would still recommend some categorizing or tagging of your posts regardless of what kind of readership you’re expecting.

There are two ways to organize your posts: categories and tags. The general rule of thumb is to use categorize for big and broad things and tags for more specific things. Both categories and tags make posts easier to find for you and your readers. It allows people to find more posts on similar topics or maybe continue reading the saga of a long and drawn-out story. The hard part is always deciding on your organization scheme. If you can figure this out beforehand, it’s usually less work. If you need to change things up later on, the amount of work really depends on how many posts you have to edit.

Another step in this organization process is to setup a plugin and/or widget to display your categories/tags for people to go directly to them. There are some built-in widgets to display categories and tags, but you might want to look for something specific once you start having a large amount of posts of varying types.

Wrapping it up
This pretty much covers what I consider to be the essentials. There are many, many other plugins and add-ons out there just begging you to play with them. Your template/theme is an aspect I didn’t mention. One reason is you can easily use one of the provided themes to get started. Another reason is this isn’t my area of expertise. Tara will be giving some advice and tips about these in the near future. If you have any questions or comments let us know.