Chris Blow writes a blog called Unthinkingly
If you been following this thread, I was prompted to explore blog metrics in this post after reading what Avinash Kaushik had to day on the topic: The blog metrics he identified were:
- Raw Author Contribution (posts & words in post)
- Unique Blog Readers (content consumption – Unique Visitors & Feed Subscribers)
- Conversation Rate (measuring success in a social medium)
- Technorati “Authority” (measuring your impact on the world!)
- Cost (what!)
- Return on Investment (what’s in it for you/your business)
I discovered that I had problem figuring out how many total feed subscribers and the trends over time because I had four feeds (three built into the typepad blogging platform) and another one in feedburner which offers the stats tracking feature.
I asked the question on my blog: Is there some way to consolidate the feeds into so they can be tracked in feedburner and not disrupt current subscribers (make the unsubscribe and resubscribe?) Chris Blow, one of my readers, was kind enough to send me clear instructions that quickly solved my problem:
The trick is with something called "redirection".
Your blogging platform typepad runs on a server. The server works like a butler: visitors come to the door, the butler answers, the visitor requests a file, and the butler gives it to them. (or gives them a polite apology and a 404 message).
So if you are doing analytics it means that the butler makes a little note of everything that goes out the door (including the address of who asked for it, and exactly what they asked for). Then you can gather up all those scribbled notes of the floor and make pretty graphs. And if you are doing redirection it means that you whisper in your butler's ear: "whenever a visitor asks for file X give them file Y."
You can do redirection for any file that you can serve ... including your feeds. ... So we need to tell the server that when someone asks for any of your feeds on typepad, to give them the feed on feedburner.
Based on my research, it looks like there used to not be a way to do this, but now there is one built into Typepad.
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