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FeedBurner Relevancy And RSS Subscriber Numbers

FeedBurner Relevancy And RSS Subscriber Numbers

By Jeffro on June 30, 2010

Jean-Baptiste Jung has a good blog post over at The Blog Herald that questions whether FeedBurner is still relevant. In the post, Jean examines how in the past month, his numbers if varied widely. As a long time user of FeedBurner, I too have seen numbers vary wildly with no explanation. By the way, it’s awesome that WPTavern.com has bumped up past the 2,000 FeedReader average.

Line Graph Swinging Up And Down

I’ve enjoyed being able to know roughly how many people are subscribed to the Tavern RSS feed but in reality, I don’t know how accurate those numbers are. While Jean lists out some other services that could replace FeedBurner such as FeedBlitz, I think we have to take a step back and ask ourselves, does the number of RSS subscribers matter anymore? Are they still used as part of the popularity of a particular website? Will you lose out on advertising sales because of little or no numbers? Without using a service like FeedBurner, you’ll have no way of knowing the reach your sites RSS feed has.

Personally, I prefer to know how many people are subscribed to the RSS feed even if it’s just a rough number. It’s one more metric I have at my disposal on monitoring the growth and reach of the site. How do you feel about the notion of RSS Subscriber numbers?

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WordPress RSS Parser SimplePie Ceases Development

WordPress RSS Parser SimplePie Ceases Development

By Jeffro on September 28, 2009

simplepielogo Over the weekend, some big news was published on the SimplePie development blog where it was announced that development for the RSS Parser would cease effective immediately. While the first version of SimplePie was built ontop of MagpieRSS, it quickly became the de-facto RSS/Atom parsing software for PHP. WordPress uses SimplePie to parse the RSS feed for the dashboard widgets such as Other WordPress News, WordPress News, etc.

Beginning in WordPress 2.8, MagpieRSS was beginning to be phased out in exchange for SimplePie due to the lack of development taking place around Magpie. Unfortunately, the same thing has happened to SimplePie leaving WordPress with a few options. First, hope that a fork of SimplePie is created which WordPress can then use. Second, continue the development of SimplePie to fit the needs of WordPress only or third, look for another actively developed RSS parser for PHP. It’s worth noting that in WordPress 2.9, SimplePie has been upgraded to version 1.3.

This doesn’t mean that dashboard feeds in WordPress will fail to be parsed as SimplePie is not a third party service. However, there are a ton of plugins in the repository that were built with the default RSS parser in WordPress both when it was Magpie and then SimplePie so this development affects those as well.

The WordPress development team is well aware of this announcement and it looks like it may be a topic of discussion for this weeks WordPress development meeting.

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My Head Is In The RSS Cloud

My Head Is In The RSS Cloud

By Jeffro on September 10, 2009

rsscloudA few days ago, Matt Mullenweg announced on the WordPress.com blog that they had enabled support for something called RSS cloud. RSS cloud may seem new, but support for it in the RSS 2.0 specification has been around for a long time. Since 2001 to be exact. However, the RSS feed for WordPress did not use the cloud element and only now with Dave Winer starting a new campaign are we starting to find out what this cloud element is capable of.

Currently, feed readers must poll the domain a number of times to figure out if any new content has been published. This is an inefficient way of doing things. RSS cloud changes that by allowing the site to notify the feed reader instantly as the content is published. This is where the term, real-time web comes into play. Here is Matt’s mini explanation of the protocol.

WordPress.com has always supported update pings through Ping-o-Matic so folks like Google Reader can get your posts as soon as they’re posted, but getting every ping in the world is a lot of work so not that many people subscribe to Ping-o-Matic. RSS Cloud effectively allows any client to register to get pings for only the stuff they’re interested in.

RSS cloud is just the first in a series of ways WordPress.com is going to support pushing content pings to users instead of vice versa. Right now, there is only one RSS reader that supports RSS cloud and that is Dave Winers own River2. Support from other feedreaders is most likely on the horizon as this real-time access to information catches on. If you use the self-hosted version of WordPress and are interested in adding RSS Cloud support to your RSS feed, you can download the RSS Cloud plugin created by Joseph Scott.
I’ve been reading about RSS cloud the past few days and I still have a hard time figuring out what the benefits are regarding real-time RSS feeds. I’m one of those folks who likes to open my feed reader, go through the posts, mark them as read and move on. When they were published is not really a big concern to me unless it’s more than three days old. What does it matter if I get your blog post an hour after it was published as opposed to 5 minutes? Right now, I’m thinking that there are a large amount of people who are simply impatient. I’m all for real-time speed for certain things but I just don’t get the point with RSS.

While reading ReadWrite/Webs take on WordPress.com enabling support for RSS cloud, there was a comment left by almostinfocus who asks a number of questions I have myself.

If everything is constantly real-time, then when is the time to absorb information, give it some thought, and respond? Are we getting to the point of too much information too fast? Are the only people involved in all these real-time conversations going to be those constantly getting short bits of information and giving quick responses before moving on to the next thing? Will this have a negative effect on thoughtful discourse in the future?

With Twitter, standard RSS Feeds and such, there are already plenty of people suffering from information overload. I think this real-time RSS stuff just adds on to that. It would be quite annoying to login to my feed reader and as I’m reading a few stories, I get bombarded by 100 different blogs publishing content.

I’ll open it up to you though. What do you think of this RSS cloud stuff? Will you be enabling support for it on your blog? Should I enable support for it on this site?

If you want to read more information regarding the protocol, check out these blog posts:
WordPress Just Made Millions of Blogs Real-Time With RSSCloud
RSSCloud.org
PubSubHubBub Versus RSS Cloud

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RSS Feed Now Fixed

RSS Feed Now Fixed

By Jeffro on May 14, 2009

I just wanted to let everyone know that the issues involved with the RSS feed have been fixed. Michael Torbert is helping me create a custom post submission form to allow me to easily take on guest blog posts. In the initial plugin, a bit of code caused the XML in the RSS feed to malfunction. This has since been fixed and I just wanted to say thanks to all of you who contacted me to let me know of the problem. Glad to see so many people reading and enjoying the feed!

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Two WordPress Migration Tips

Two WordPress Migration Tips

By Jeffro on April 27, 2009

Over the course of this past weekend, I migrated content from one domain to another. My biggest concern regarding the migration was all of the backlinks that the site had received plus the Search Engine pointers which would exist for some time to come. Thankfully, I discovered two things which made the migration very easy.

First, I came across a plugin called Update URLs. This plugin created by Velvet Blues is really simple to use. Since I was moving my content from one domain to another and quite a few URLs within the content were hard coded to images, I needed a quick and easy way to simply replace the site URL. That’s exactly what Update URLs enables me to do as it provides a box for the OLD url and then the NEW url. Once I set that up, I click the button and like magic, all hardcoded site url links are changed.

My second tip is an htaccess modifcation that drove me bonkers until community member Mark McWilliams pointed me to an article which contained the exact bit of code I needed. What I wanted to do was make sure that if someone were to visit /articlename it would automatically redirect them to http://jeffc.me/articlename that way, all backlinks are kept in tact until the domain expires. While I’ll eventually lose some link love because not all backlinked sites will update the link, doing this provides me enough time to hopefully have Google change the URL in their search engine result pages

In the article, this is the bit of code which provided what I needed:

Redirect Old domain to New domain (htaccess redirect)

Create a .htaccess file with the below code, it will ensure that all your directories and pages of your old domain will get correctly redirected to your new domain.
The .htaccess file needs to be placed in the root directory of your old website (i.e the same directory where your index file is placed)

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This code works wonders and will buy the time I need to get my backlinks in order. Thanks Mark for helping me out and I hope this comes in handy for someone else down the road. Thanks to the WXR format or WordPress Extended RSS file which easily exports my comments, file attachments including images, posts, pages, etc, moving the actual content was the easiest part.

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