Please update your Tech Ticker feed!

Posted by: Mike Bogle | 2 March 2008

Please update your Tech Ticker feed!

After waiting perhaps far too long to get set up, I’ve just configured this blog for use with Feedburner.

This feed is now available at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/techtickerdotnet

Normally something relatively cosmetic like this wouldn’t warrant a blog post, however I’ve just discovered a very surprising, and equally irritating fact about WordPress.com: You cannot redirect your RSS feed. In fact you can’t even PAY for the option; it just doesn’t exist.

With most blogs, including Blogspot/Blogger, Edublogs.org, and even self-hosted WordPress instances, once a feed has been burned with Feedburner it’s just a matter of updating the settings to point to the new feed location. After that, anytime a user clicks on the orange RSS icon in the address field of the browser, the user is directed to the Feedburner page and not the one that comes native with the platform.

Using Feedburner, bloggers can take advantage of a suite of informative tools to gain a better appreciation of who is viewing their blog. WordPress has reasonable native stat’s to indicate who is visiting the blog, but provides absolutely NO information on readers who access the blog remotely via RSS aggregators and feed readers. Essentially this under-represents the number of page hits.

Unfortunately, as per this fairly lengthy discussion in the forums area, WordPress.com users are currently doomed to a tale of two unsynchronised and unrequited RSS feeds: the native one that appears in the browser address field, and the Feedburner one that is publicised via an icon or chicklet in the blog menu.

Were it a just matter of having to reference two different locations to gain a holistic picture of your RSS subscribers this would be only an inconvenience. Astoundingly this isn’t even possible.

There is nowhere in the WordPress.com dashboard area that features your RSS stats. Unbelievably, this feature once existed but has since been taken out. Why this is the case does not seem to be posted anywhere, leaving users to express their frustration and consternation in the forums area and essentially preach to the converted.

All that being said, please update your Tech Ticker feed to http://feeds.feedburner.com/techtickerdotnet

Please not though, the Feedburner instance does not include the Odiogo podcast options. So if you prefer the audio version, by all means please continue to use the alternative feed. I’ll take accessibility over accurate statistics and reporting any day.

Update: Minor correction, I’ve just discovered that there are statistics available for the number of syndicated vs. on-site views at the level of individual posts. However no such stats are available for the aggregate of day, week, or month views; nor can you view a single daily breakdown of post-by-post performance (e.g. all posts viewed that day are displayed with hits broken into syndicated vs. on-site activity).

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