How can I track RSS subscribers for a feed with parameters?
March 28, 2010 8:48 PM   Subscribe

I have an RSS feed that takes parameters, something like http://my.site/rss.php?parameter=foo. I want to track subscribers for this feed. FeedBurner won't work, because it doesn't support this. Is there any service out there that does?
posted by zavulon to Computers & Internet (6 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Google's Webmaster Tools service is "supporting a feed I have called http://www.www.examples.com/?feed=rss2".
posted by griphus at 9:00 PM on March 28, 2010


Wow, hella misplaced quotation mark.
posted by griphus at 9:00 PM on March 28, 2010


Short: I don't have an answer.

I parse the OP a couple of ways.

a) You have a feed http://foo.com/rss.php?var=bar and you don't think that feed can be run through Feedburner. I think it can. You'll get a unique address from Feedburner that you can name.

e.g.

http://foo.com/rss.php?var=bar could become http://feeds.feedburner.com/FooDotComRSSBar/

or

b) You have a feed http://foo.com/rss.php?var=bar and whether it's FeedBurner or some other service or tool, you want to think of this as one feed while various subscribers may pass through various parameters and values which, presumably, will affect the contents of the feed.

I think most tools will think of each possible permutation with a unique URL including parameters, and different contents, as a unique feed. You could set up multiple Feedburner feeds for the main permutations of this "one feed" you care about, if that's reasonable.

I'll be interested to see what others might suggest.

Obviously the other problem with Feedburner, or anything else that requires a different URL, is that you'll have to convince people to subscribe to the new address(es) for stuff they're already getting before you can count them.

You might be left with server-side crunching all on your own or with conventional serverside tools.
posted by mjb at 9:11 PM on March 28, 2010


Response by poster: mjb - it's option b).

Problem with feedburner, is it only gives you one URL: http://feeds.feedburner.com/mysite.

Let's say I have mysite.com/rss.php?foo=bar and mysite.com/rss.php?foo=quoz

FeedBurner redirects both of them to http://feeds.feedburner.com/mysite, and http://feeds.feedburner.com/mysite?foo=bar has no effect, it's the same as http://feeds.feedburner.com/mysite.
posted by zavulon at 9:47 PM on March 28, 2010


You can give mysite.com/rss.php?foo=bar and mysite.com/rss.php?foo=quoz two unique Feeburner URLs, something like http://feeds.feedburner.com/mysitefoobar and http://feeds.feedburner.com/mysitefooquoz. If you have too many values of foo to do this manually, you could use the Feedburner API to do it automatically every time you get a new value for foo.
posted by scottreynen at 10:06 PM on March 28, 2010


Best answer: I don't see why you would need a service to do this. Just modify rss.php to insert a row in a table with $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] and a timestamp for each hit, and then you can get reports of how many subscribers you have in a given time period with a single SQL query.
posted by Rhomboid at 2:10 AM on March 29, 2010


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