RSS usage tracking - rss

Is there a way to track if anyone is using your RSS feeds?
Thanks.

Feedburner (feedburner.google.com) can give you all sorts of stats. I know there are others providing similar services, but that's the one I've used in the past.

Feedburner does exactly that: http://feedburner.google.com

You can include a small single-pixel invisible image in the HTML inside the description tags. This image can be loaded dynamically from a server-side script. When the script executes, you will know some user is reading your RSS feed content and the image has loaded because of that. This way you get to monitor the stats rather than rely one some other service.

Related

Set a tag to track links from a visual basic app in google analytics

I hope I can explain myself.
See. I have this little program where I put a link to my site, what I want to know if there's some way to add a tag into the URL so Google Analytics can count the amount of visitors coming from that program.
Like when you parse the GET in php.
something like http:\\www.stackoverflow.com\?something_to_google_analytics_to_read
If this is possible, I assume that I need also to configure that Tag into Analytic's, or?
Thanks
As #SLaks pointed, I can find a step by step guide for create what I wanted in:
https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033867?ref_topic=1032998
It is called Campaigns.
Thanks

displaying live feeds : dailybooth live feed, twitter search result stream

What is the web technology behind displaying live feeds like twitter search results and dailybooth live feed? Can I get similar results from any RSS with some coding?
The main technology behind such websites often is Ajax. This is used to dynamically change the webpages instead of reloading the whole page.
Yes, you can! You will probably need a realtime (PubSubHubbub-enabled feed) to achieve this, and plug it into some kind of websocket/comet/ajax/longpolling client... but that should work easily. Check this, for example. It's the firehose of gowalla checkins posted to a google map. All the code is on github, so it's quite easy to build, play with!

Preventing RSS feed scraping?

On a Wordpress site, I have both a normal blog that I want Google to detect and an RSS feed for outgoing links to other sites. I don't need/want bots to get at this other RSS feed nor do I want people to be able to get the link for their own use.
I've disabled RSS for the main blog successfully but am not sure how to encrypt/protect/hide the RSS link for this additional feed.
I'm not sure how Facebook runs a newsfeed without RSS but however they do it is probably beyond my means/experience to replicate.
Where these are just outgoing links, I don't think copyright notices in the feed will do much. Maybe there is a way to output the links automatically through a means other than RSS?
Use Robots.Text www.robotstxt.org to prevent google from following the link. All self respecting robots should follow the directives in the robots.txt file. This file needs to go in the root of your sit.
The basic answer to this is to use a method of getting the feed entries in a manner other than using the actual RSS like outputting JSON, going through the API, etc.
It will help prevent scraping though not completely.

Read rss and show as html

I am using google reader for my RSS, i want to export all my shared or starred rss items to HTML to take this html and put on my website
Do any one have an idea about?
And one important thing as well, can i page through this html? i mean to export as pages not all in one html page to let the user on my site page through my starred feeds.
Thanks,
With XSTL you can transform XML to any format you want, including HTML. You can do the transformation on the server, or with modern browsers like IE6+ and Firefox2+ you can do the transformation on the client side. XSTL isn't very pretty as a programming language, but the concept is pretty neat.
I don't know if you can link directly to the RSS feed XML so that it's always up to date. I think Google requires that you authenticate and have permission to access the feed.
You can read from an RSS with jQuery by selecting and iterating through the tags rather easily. Additionally, you can perform conditional-checks on attributes etc as well.

Add RSS to any website?

Is there any website/service which will enable me to add RSS subscription to any website?
This is for my company I work. We have a website which displays company related news. These news are supplied by an external agency and they gets updated to our database automatically. Our website picks up random/new news and displays them. We are looking at adding a "Subscribe via RSS" button to our website.
If you have the data in your database, creating one yourself is fairly straight forward - there's a simple tutorial here.
Once you've set up a feed, in the <head> of your page, you put text like:
<link rel="alternate" title="RSS Feed"
href="http://www.example.com/rss-feed/latest/" type="application/rss+xml" />
This allows the feed to be "auto-discovered" by your user's browser (e.g. the RSS icon appears in the address bar in FF).
Here's an article that discusses various webscrapers that will generate feeds: http://www.masternewmedia.org/news/2006/03/09/how_to_create_a_rss.htm
If you don't care to click through, here are the services the author discusses:
http://www.feedyes.com/
http://www.feed43.com/
http://www.feedfire.com/site/index.html
Other webscrapers suggested in the other answers:
http://page2rss.com/
http://www.dapper.net/
However, you're probably better off generating the feeds yourself from the info in the DB.
Your question is a little difficult to understand. Are you trying to generate the RSS for others to consume, or are you trying to consume someone else's RSS?
If you are trying to generate your RSS feed for others to consume you will need to read the spec:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/rss/rss.html
If you are trying to consume it, that link will also help. Then you'll need to look into an XML / RSS parser.
If you can provide more details I can update my answer.
If you are not in a position to add an RSS feed to the existing site, see Page2Rss as an intermediate solution.
Might Dapper be of some use? You just need to set up which bits of your news feed to scour and voila, instant rss without having to touch any code...
Actually this is very doable with Yahoo! Pipes. Assuming that 1) your page is under 200k, 2) your robots.txt file does not disallow Pipes, and 3) your news feed has a unique ID, like so:
<ul id="newsfeed">
... you could use the Fetch Page module, trim it to just the items inside the news feed, loop though each list item, and use an Item Builder module to mangle the relevant bits as a proper RSS feed. Then, in the head of your document, you'd put in an RSS link, like so:
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="News Feed" href="http://pipes.yahoo.com/your_pipe_id" />
This is of course completely ass-backwards, but would work for a quick fix, or in situations where you had no control over the body of the page.
Write a webhandler that exposes the content of the database as an RSS feed.
You either need to roll your own, or get a service that is a screen scraper.
After you have created your feed, you can use something like Feedburner to disseminate it.
If you happen to be using ASP.NET, you might want to check out the ASP.NET RSS Toolkit. It's useful for both generating and consuming feeds.

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