In my article I Thought Plugins Were Just For Bald Guys I talked about what WordPress Plugins are. There are quite a few WordPress Plugins that do a lot of different things. They allow you to extend the functionality of WordPress in many different ways that can be advantageous to your blog.
When you first start blogging, you eventually become aware of a service called FeedBurner. FeedBurner is a way for you to track how many readers subscribe to your blog. As you travel the blogosphere you’ll see many bloggers who display the count of their RSS readers using the FeedBurner FeedCount. Below is an image of a FeedBurner FeedCount.
What is FeedBurner?
From FeedBurner’s website:
FeedBurner is the leading provider of media distribution and audience engagement services for blogs and RSS feeds. Our Web-based tools help bloggers, podcasters and commercial publishers promote, deliver and profit from their content on the Web.
Your readers can subscribe a few different ways to your blog. Two popular ways your blog readers can subscribe are through your RSS feed with an RSS reader and by email. When someone subscribes to your blog using their email address they receive your blog’s RSS feed directly to their email.
If a blog reader were to subscribe using Google Reader and subscribe by email to your blog, that would count as two readers. By the way, I do this for quite a few blogs that I read. The blogs that I’m really interested in recieving content, I subscribe both by email and in Google Reader.
With WordPress there are many ways for your blog readers to receive your feed – rss, rss2, rdp, atom, feed, comments, etc. You don’t need to understand each one right now but you do need to know that their is a WordPress Plugin that will make sure all the different feeds that are used by your readers are being counted.
Let’s take a look at Google Reader for an example. I’ll add the word problogger to the Add Subscription box (see below).
After clicking on “Add”, some of the following results are displayed.
Well, if you’ve been a blogger for a while and have heard of Darren Rowse of Problogger the two red-circled numbers above are Darren’s subscribers to two different feeds – his FeedBurner feed (11, 897) and his default WordPress feed (4,696). These are distinguished by looking at the two different feed URLs under each title of ProBlogger Blog Tips. To combine these two numbers and make sure that both feeds display correctly in FeedBurner, you’ll want to use the FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin.
The FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin is listed below in my WordPress Plugins.
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The FeedBurner FeedSmith plugin consists of one file called FeedBurner_FeedSmith_Plugin.php. You FTP this file to your WordPress Plugins folder and “Activiate” it. After you activate the plugin you’ll need to work with the following screen which is located under your Options->FeedBurner page.
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This had an almost double readership affect at one of my blogs. I was not getting the “Full Monty” of my blog readership in my FeedBurner count.
Although the plugin started out with Steve Smith at Ordered List, Steve handed the development of the plugin directly over to the folks at FeedBurner.
Make sure this is part of your WordPress Plugin arsenal.
There will be a transparent view of distinction between these two feedburners. Fairly much better than seeing two totally different thing. I will use it for my website.