I’ve started using Google Analytics to get an idea about the readership of my humble blog. Fortunately, it appears to be growing in visits (at around 60 per day at the moment), and the number of page views per visit also seems to be on the increase (around 1.8).
However, this is only part of the story—I also consume blogs via my preferred RSS reader (JetBrains’ Omea) which will be ignored through Google’s JavaScript. So, I decided to try using FeedBurner’s free service. In effect, FeedBurner take over control for providing your RSS feed to your subscribers, and capture a little information in the process.
Fortunately, it’s possible to use URL rewriting, which is even easier with Lighttpd. So, the snippet from my config file that does it all:
$HTTP["useragent"] !~ "FeedBurner" { url.redirect = ("/xml/rss20/feed.xml" => "http://feeds.feedburner.com/oobaloo")}
Stick that inside your site’s configuration section and you’re off and running. One thing to note though is that it’s important to check the user-agent to ensure that FeedBurner’s bots can still retrieve the RSS feed from my server, just that everyone else gets the burned feed.
Anyway, that concludes all for this working week, time for some booze and then some more Rails hackery over the weekend.