What I don't like about feedburner
Posted by Ian Holsman
First let me say I love FeedBurner and use it on most of my sites. It provides a simple way of collecting stats on who how populars your feeds are. (I’m happy to say I have over 100 people subscribed to this blog).
and If I cared enough i would get some great stats on who you guys are, and what your reading.
but there is the problem.
feedburner locks me in and hides this from my application.
when implementing Economy Chat I chose to implement a simple wisdom of the crowds feature which showed which posts were popular . Part of this feature was trying to implement 1 user 1 vote so that people coming back to the same page wouldn’t obscure the stats.
This worked fine for general web viewers, but failed miserably when it came to people who viewed it via RSS. (which make up a sizeable portion of readers). as feedburner can’t personalize the URLs being passed to the RSS reader and associate them with my a specific individual when they click through.
of course other web-based viewers like blog lines do similar things as well, which makes it very hard to get usage data. (that and some RSS viewers are very privacy protective and don’t pass cookies through, which isn’t a bad thing from the consumers point of view).
what would be REALLY REALLY great is if services like bloglines and feedburner could pass some kind of unique id in the post link they generate to allow RSS provides to get access to these stats.
but they don’t.
so I’m stuck generating unique URLs for each visitor and forcing bloglines to read my news one per subscriber and not being able to use feedburner’s great stats either :-(