On Nov 23, 3:48 pm, Mike Orr <[email protected]> wrote: > Now that I have RSS/Atom newsfeeds set up, managers are asking how > many subscribers are there? Is there any way to calculate that? My > first thought was to count up the number of feed hits vs home page > hits, but that's bogus because it would include every feed update, > which is done whenever the user agent feels like it. Counting by > unique session IDs would also be bogus because each update is a > different session. Counting by unique IPs is bogus due to > network-address translation. Our privacy policy does not allow > persistent user IDs. > > The only thing I can think of is to put a random number in a query > parameter when generating feed URLs. Then the number of active feeds > each month would be the count of unique feed numbers. Or is there a > better way?
Wouldn't the "random number in a query parameter" be a persistent user id ? The only think i can think of, that would be truly non-persistent-id , would be to use some sort of redirect or cookie... 1- All links to subscribe / read go to "rss:a" 2- If "rss:a" sees a non-unique cookie "seen=1", it redirects to "rss:b" / or displays the content 3- if it doesn't see the cookie, it sets one... logs it... then does the redirect/display I'm not sure how rss cookies work... it seems like some use systems describe HTTP cookies , others use url-encoded strings If the privacy policy allows it, the method you thought of would probably be ideal. If not, I'd push for a privacy policy change -- you should be able to persist a random identifier , like any of the analytics suites out there do. i believe that's what feedburner and feedblitz do too -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "pylons-discuss" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/pylons-discuss?hl=en.
