[WebPub] Fwd: Counting Drupal RSS feed subscribers

[Denise Brehm]

FYI: I'm fowarding this to the group in case anyone else can use this very helpful response! Thanks, Mark.

Denise

Begin forwarded message:

From: "Mark J. Pearrow" <mpearrow at csail.mit.edu<mailto:mpearrow at csail.mit.edu>>
Date: January 24, 2013 11:44:25 AM EST
To: Denise Brehm <brehm at mit.edu<mailto:brehm at mit.edu>>
Cc: Web Publishing <webpub at mit.edu<mailto:webpub at mit.edu>>
Subject: Re: [WebPub] Counting Drupal RSS feed subscribers

Hi Denise,

Counting RSS subscribers is a process of estimation, at best. Services like Feedblitz have the advantage of redirecting your users through their infrastructure, and thus abstracting away some of the process (at a cost), but really all you need to do is look at your server logs.

In Drupal, your top-level RSS feed is /rss.xml and most of your other feeds will end in /feed - so you can quickly scrub the logs for these patterns, either in a tool like Google Analytics or by using your own script, to get a list of unique IP addresses that have accessed the feed in a given time frame.

Of course, without forcing each and every "subscriber" (which is inherently a pull process, not a push process) to use a middleman and divulge personal information, you won't know if two+ unique humans from one unique IP address are subscribers :) But it will at least give you the order of magnitude and maybe a bit better than that.

There's a bit more info and a Perl script here:

http://alvinalexander.com/perl/how-many-rss-subscribers-apache-log-perl

You'd want to alter the regex in that script to also pay attention to /feed, btw

hth,

mjp




On Jan 23, 2013, at 3:31 PM, Denise Brehm wrote:

Dear Webpub:

Does anyone have suggestions for an analytics service that will count the number of subscribers to a Drupal RSS feed? Feedburner is apparently on its way out. We are trying Feedblitz, which has its own RSS feed, but it's taking a lot of time to configure (and still we've failed to get it working).

Thanks.
Denise

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Denise Brehm
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