John Handelaar wrote:
Nick Lewis wrote:
Hi folks, I'm in the early stages of building a set of scripts that parse out info about hits to a site's RSS feed. The goal is to trasmogrify what is now only viewable as thousands of anonymous hits to node/feed to a list of total hits to node/feed by ip address. My hope is that this will be the foundation for a module/feature that gives me a ballpark idea of how many RSS subscribers I actually have.
How about amending the feed's link URLs?
eg node/5 becomes feedtracker/{sessionid}/node/5
Holy jumpin Jesus that is a good idea!!!!!! One problem.... I have no idea how to implement it.... I could probably figure it out with some research. John, could you be more specific as to why AOL IP addresses have made your life miserable? If it just skews the results, blocking a bunch of subscribers to one IP I think I and others would be able to *live with that*. Khalid, or anyone else, what's the better approach in your opinion? Note that John's idea kind of rules out the possibility of this being part of a core module. Also note that by approaching it as an extension to statistics, we could use the same scripting to tackle the much missed feature of being able to track page hits by hostname. However, for the purpose, tracking the actual reading patterns of RSS subscribers is more useful than merely tracking how many times they've accessed the feeds. Also regarding your notes of IP being imperfect -- well, yes, but I nevertheless think that it at least gives a picture of your RSS readers, albeit a distorted one. But I still think something is better than nothing in this case. Also, would not selecting * from [access table] WHERE timestamp > than [ recorded timestamp of last table scan] on the cron run be the least expensive way possible? Bear in mind that I'm relatively new to programming mysql. Will now check out xtracker, do some research into John's idea, and do some testing.... Best, Nick Lewis
A module can log and 302-redirect "clicks". This rather depends on aggregators being trackable by session ID, which I have no knowledge of at all.
But ferchrissakes *please* don't go anywhere near IP addresses. The number of things which I've had to clean up in my life because a site happens to have lots of (eg) AOL users [1] is turning me grey before my time.
jh
[1] Before replying with something regarding RSS and AOL, read that again and notice I said 'eg' as well.