Feedburner(http://feedburner.google.com) provides statistics about RSS feed of subscribers and reaches. This is interesting.
It is easy to understand that Feedburner can count visits (reaches) to a RSS feed. But, how does Feedburner get to know subscribers to a RSS feed.
In my understanding, each requests to RSS Feed URI is independent. There are no cookies or identity validation. So, how does feedburner know how many subscribers to a RSS feed?
The easy part is Google tell it the number of Google Readers, and so do the other Reader/Aggregators.
For individual users polling the RSS/Atom feed, there are http headers involved in the request, so users are tracked by IP address, and when behind proxies, a number of proxies include original IP in header, this helps sort between proxied sources.
Failing that you could read the FeedBurner help on that topic.
I wonder if it knows anything at all.
--- end sarcasm ---
Seriously, my sub numbers for my blog will jump from about 2k to about 3k at the drop of a hat.
Determining subscriber count is an inexact science at best.
It does rely on reporting from other services, and sometimes these services go down, or they change how they report.
Services like FeedBurner are actualy a proxy feed to your blog's feed. So when you use FeedBurner (or alike) users subscribe to a feed hosted on Google's servers that is fed from your feed.
Thusly people are really subscribing to the feed hosted by Google and they can then get statistics just as if you were visiting a site.
Related
So, I've started working for a company, lets call it XYZ, doing marketing in general and helping form their SEO strategy and get a handle on how well their website is performing. They have a Wordpress website that is managed by an outside firm, and a Mailchimp newsletter that goes out monthly.
The direct traffic in Google Analytics is super high. I found that they had a Shopify store at one point, and I'm pretty sure it wasn't properly done and was causing the GA tag to fire wrong, resulting in a lot of self-referrals.
Our newsletter went out recently, and we saw a spike in traffic. Much more traffic than the Mailchimp Analytics can account for. Digging into the analytics, it looks like bot traffic. Quincy, Washington, Cheyenne, Wyoming and others. We aren't near these areas nor do we do business in these areas, and each city had a high number of hits, more than is normal. So probably bots, so far so good.
Here is the mystery I am trying to solve, and I hope I can get this explained correctly.
I checked the analytics after our most recent newsletter (an rss feed type with a template maid in Mailchimp) I saw a spike in traffic, which was the bot traffic I mentioned earlier. This bot traffic hit a webpage that doesn't exist on our domain. as an example
xyz.com/5-things-for-a-list-article/Here
The traffic was all trying to get to a URL structured like the one above.
The actual URL for the post would look like this in the example
xyz.com/5-things-for-a-list-article/
The extra word at the end of the traffic hitting a 404 page is the first word from the article.
The link in the newsletter shows a snippet of the post.
Digging into the history of the site and the newsletter this happens, (albeit not as much as this most recent time and not all the time) with a lot of posts that are shared in the newsletter. I look at the day the newsletter goes out, there is some amount of traffic to the 404 page, and the link path is the actual URL to the post, but with the first word of the article tacked on the end.
What is happening here? Are bots crawling the newsletter and getting the URL links wrong?
I will also add that our website is a WordPress install that uses the DIVI theme or plugin or whatever it is. At first I thought it was to blame because the URL with the high surge of traffic was going to a custom post type created by DIVI, but regular posts have had it happen as well. THe only connection I have found so far is the bots hit a 404 page that has the URL of an item in the RSS feed to our newsletter.
Anyone that can shed some light, I would greatly appreciate you.
My guess is that there is an error in the Mailchimp template, where there is no space between the url and the first word in the source of the email so "https://example.com/page/ abc ..." is seen in email clients as "https://example.com/page/abc ..."
It would have helped if you had shown the example source from the email and the code used to construct the URL, as I've had to go for a best guess at reverse engineering the likely cause.
As far as I know, in order to get RSS in real time (i.e be pubsubhubbub subscriber) , the one who generates the RSS feed, must be a pubsubhubbub publisher, which means the RSS feed must include a tag which includes the HUB address.
However, there are lots of RSS feeds (published using RSS 2.0 only and not pubsubhubbub) which I can subscribe to via Feedly.
How is it possible?
Thanks,
Qwerty
So, Feedly does use PubSubHubbub, thru Superfeedr (and other hubs, such as Google's or Wordpress).
Fir the feeds which do not support PubSubHubbub, Feedly polls feeds at regular intervals. You may want to check this other question for more details.
Also, please note that Superfeedr can also be used as a "default hub" which works even for feeds which do not support PubSubHubbub.
I have a Drupal website, and I am currently using Feedburner, mainly to get statistics about the number of subscribers and methods of subscriptions.
However "burning" my feed is complicated, it's hard to restrict people from accessing the original feed, and it only does one feed, as opposed to various tag feeds, user feeds, etc.
How would you have Drupal collect and present feed access and subscription satistics?
Are you using the Feedburner module? It will do redirection from the original feed URL to the FeedBurner feed URL (FeedBurner itself will still have access to the original). You can do it for multiple feeds, though I think you still have to add those manually, which will be cumbersome for all the various tag feeds.
We are thinking to implement RSS feeds at the company i work with as a form of banking /transaction alerts to users.
Does anyone know if this has been done in e-banking apps? Anyone knows any possible security threats? Any articles, haven't found that much on the net.
Possible threat: How do you control access to the feeds? Usual RSS feeds are unprotected; you could have a RSS feed over HTTPS + Basic auth, but is it sufficient for your security guidelines (since it's a bank, I doubt it)? Even if it passed muster, are you sure you want to have two different access paths into the system? More specific ways of authorization will break most RSS readers (as they don't have significant support for more complex authorization schemes).
Also, some people use web-based readers (Google Reader); how do they authorize? Once you allow a web-based RSS reader to spider your RSS feeds, how do you prevent it from sharing this content with other users?
We have a site that is serving some RSS feeds, and we'd like to know how many people is subscribed to each one, without using a system like FeedBurner to serve them.
The original approach to figuring this out was basically logging requests, and then getting the number of unique IP's that had requested each feed. However, if I get 1 million people subscribing through Google Reader, for example, then I'm only going to get 1 request from Google for all the subscribers, right?
Is there a way around this?
How does FeedBurner itself work around it?
Being Google's property now, it can surely find out how many people are subscribed to a certain feed in GReader specifically, but I'm sure there are other online RSS feeds that would pose the same problems.
Any ideas?
This doesn't answer your entire question, but when Google Reader crawls your feed, it will expose to you, in the User-Agent, the number of people subscribed via Google Reader:
http://www.google.com/support/reader/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=70001