A month or so ago, when Google bought (acquired, whatever) Feedburner, several new "perks" were added to free accounts. Free is good, and despite the oft quoted "you get what you pay for," I have been relatively pleased with the upgrade to feedburner pro. You get to see more fun statistical "stuff" with feed usage. But I have to ask, what's up with the site tracks options? I have to check the box beside "exclude visits from this computer" every day in order to make this work. Yes, I'm clicking on save and have tried changing the script, but inevitably I get hits from my own computer and/or my computer at work. This is especially annoying when I have issues with a post and have to publish more than once to fix things. Sheesh, it inflates the visitor stats like crazy.
And another thing, lately when attempting to access feedburner from home I get kicked out after my login in is accepted, circling the wagons back to my username and password again and again. This makes it difficult to check mark the box and stop counting visits from this computer; that did not happen before the acquisition (shame). But on the plus side, a few weeks ago both the official blogger blog and feedburner blog introduced a way to mash all the feeds together and provide a single feed with a better view of subscriber statistics. In the post, Feedburner Integration for Blogspot Blogs, they explained:
"Why is redirecting so important? We're glad you asked. By redirecting your feed, you can get a true picture of how many subscribers you have. Some of you might even see a few more subscribers magically appear, though results will most certainly vary. Why so? Sometimes, publishers inadvertently fragment their feed audience by offering more than one feed address on the blog itself or within their autodiscovery tags (the method by which feed readers automatically detect the address of your feed for syndication purposes). This results in some subscribers not being counted, and no one wants that in a world where everyone should count for something. By redirecting your feed, you can consolidate any straggler subscribers and greatly improve your ability to effectively measure your audience." (Feedburner Blog, 7/11/07)
This tool has worked as advertised with my total number of subscribers almost tripling when everyone is being fed the same feed. And aside from my issues last week, inadvertantly messing with what appears in feed readers (full version verses short), it was as simple as advertised. I have also noticed the feedburner stats and the statscounter stats producing similar statistics after the feed mash. Time will tell. Especially since I do not forsee a lessening of interest in blog statistics.
On another note, there were two posts published earlier this afternoon intersperced amongst the existing posts. Why? I had previously worked on these, forgot about finishing, and finally decided I better get them out of draft format. They did break up the Harry Potter all the time posts.
Tags: Feedburner, Feedburner feed mash, Blog statistics
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