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New Feedburner Stats
 
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zoli



Joined: 27 Jun 2005
Posts: 108

PostPosted: Thu Jan 04, 2007 12:46 pm    Post subject: New Feedburner Stats Reply with quote

Feedburner announced the blog stats feature. It requires installing a script. I wonder if:
  • We should select one of the pre-configured versions like MT, WP .. etc, or pick "other" and customize it.
  • Whether it should be part of the category and article templates, or perhaps a component added to the footer area?
Thanks a lot,

HAPPY NEW YEAR
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john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Thu Jan 04, 2007 11:57 pm    Post subject: Re: New Feedburner Stats Reply with quote

Happy New Year Zoli!

To answer your question, first let's talk about how most third party stats services work and how they enable you to learn about your stats from a service that has no access to your log files...

All remote stats services ask you to place a piece of Javascript code in your blog template. When a visitor accesses one of the pages of your site, their browser loads the HTML and finds this Javascript. This script loads from the remote site, so your browser calls to this site and says, hey, I want to load this Javascript. That service might use this Javascript to ask your browser some questions, and your browser will surrender some info, like I'm a certain kind of web browser and I am at such and such an IP address, and I am calling from some URL (your weblog page) and I'm a Mac or PC or whatever and my screen size is... You get the idea...

Typically the remote service can tell what page your visitor is accessing at the time the Javascript loads, because the browser passes this information along as the referer (sic) URL.

So third party stats services can capture some interesting information about your visitors, your visitors who use web browsers that can understand Javascript. These third party stats services don't see search engine robots or comment or trackback spammers for example because those visitors do not request the Javascript embedded in your page.

So all that should be required to use a third party stats service is for us to place the Javascript code on all of our pages. I would normally suggest that we do that by creating a custom component and addint it to the footer of the blog. I've done this for a number of stats services and it works great.

But now I will finally get to the reason I needed all the preface above... Every stats program I've seen picks up the URL being tracked by looking at the referer URL when the Javascript phones home to the site tracking service. So the Performancing Metrics service (which just announced it will be closing unfortunately) for example only needs code like this:

Code:
<script id="stats_script" type="text/javascript" src="http://metrics.performancing.com/stats.js"></script>


As long as that code appears on every page, which we could do by simply making a custom component that appears in the footer, the remote stats service will track all of our human visitors. The remote service will know which page the vistor loaded because the browser itself will send along the referer URL - the URL that your visitor is viewing - when requesting the Javascript. That's how the stats service can track hits to each of your individual pages.

As for this new Feedburner service, I've read their instructions and the key difference between this service and all the other services I've seen is that they require you to use a Javascript code that is dynamically generated, a different Javascript code for every page on your site.

Here's the issue - our platform doesn't always output the current URL within the templating system. So we can't easily drop in a code which will output the current URL as part of the Javascript.

For this reason, I would say that "officially" our service is not compatible with the new Feedburner stats for this reason.

That being said, there may be a way to workaround this and create some code that can be used to identify the current URL in the majority of cases. I'll work on some ideas and post here when I have some results...
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zoli



Joined: 27 Jun 2005
Posts: 108

PostPosted: Tue Jan 09, 2007 12:04 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

John, Tris Hussey seems to have got it work with his blogware-based blog:
http://blog.larixconsulting.com/blog/_archives/2005/6/19/954481.html
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john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Tue Jan 09, 2007 9:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

zoli wrote:
John, Tris Hussey seems to have got it work

You're referencing an older post from June 2005 about the FeedBurner Stats PRO service, which has nothing to do with Feedburner's recent upgrade to its StandardStats service which allows the tracking of blog (not feed) stats ... Yes, it's confusing.
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zoli



Joined: 27 Jun 2005
Posts: 108

PostPosted: Tue Jan 09, 2007 10:14 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Ouch ... sorry Crying or Very sad
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john
Site Admin


Joined: 16 Mar 2004
Posts: 3434

PostPosted: Sun Feb 25, 2007 8:24 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

I gave this a shot on one of the blogs I run. Feedburner seems to generate Site Stats, though I can't say how accurate they are. Here are the steps I used:

First, login to the Feedburner site and click Analyze, then StandardStats. Note that Feedburner says:

Quote:
Tracking code installed using this method is not compatible with FeedFlare or FAN. If you wish to activate these services in the future, you will need to install additional code.


I don't use FeedFlare or FAN so I don't know what would be required if you do...

Next step, choose Others from the Get the HTML code to collect stats on your site menu.

Scroll down a bit and look for the bold text that says Copy… and copy the text in that box. It will probably look something like this:

Code:
<script src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~s/YourFeedName?i=POST-URL-HERE" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script>


The bit we're concerned with is going to be the POST-URL-HERE part. As mentioned above, our templating system won't necessarily output the current URL so we have to replace that with a long string of code from our templating language:

Code:
<script src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~s/YourFeedName?i={{if view_url}}YOUR-BLOG-URL-HERE{{view_url}}{{else}}{{if breadcrumb}}{{loop breadcrumb}}{{if __last__}}{{url}}{{/if}}{{/loop}}{{else}}{{if category.label eq "Main Page"}}{{blog.url}}{{/if}}{{/if}}{{/if}}" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script>


Replace the YOUR-BLOG-URL-HERE with your Blog URL, in your case:

Code:
<script src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~s/YourFeedName?i={{if view_url}}http://www.zoliblog.com{{view_url}}{{else}}{{if breadcrumb}}{{loop breadcrumb}}{{if __last__}}{{url}}{{/if}}{{/loop}}{{else}}{{if category.label eq "Main Page"}}{{blog.url}}{{/if}}{{/if}}{{/if}}" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script>


Place this code in a custom component, drop that component into your footer, and this should work to implement Feedburner stats on your blog...
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zoli



Joined: 27 Jun 2005
Posts: 108

PostPosted: Sun Feb 25, 2007 8:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Wow, thanks. giving it a try now. Very Happy
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