Wednesday, April 21, 2004

Tracking people that read my blog

So a few days ago I posted that 500 unique visitors had viewed my blog from March 15 to April 15. That number was based on my counter, which tracks unique visitors that visit the blog via their browser.

I got an e-mail from Dane at Business Opportunities Weblog telling me that he reads my blog (Thanks again, Dane!), but that he read it via an aggregator, which is the same way I read most blogs. It was then that I realized that I really had no way of tracking who subscribes to my blog via the ATOM and RSS feeds that I provide.

I did some research on the web and found this post, but this seems to specifically relate to Microsoft's asp.net blogging tool. Looking on Bloglines, my aggregator, I noticed that there is a "Subscribers" link on each of the blogs that I am subscribed to. Wanting to experiment with this, I looked at my own blog (yes, I subscribe to my own blog so that I can see how things look when they come across the feed), clicked the "subscribers" link, and got this page in response.

There are limitations to this Bloglines tracking method, specifically:
- it only shows public blogs, so anyone that keeps their list private doesn't show up here
- it only shows Bloglines subscribers, so I am only potentially counting a small number of subscribers to my feeds

It would be interesting to see a more public implementation of the link above to the asp.net program. Or maybe I missed something in my searches -- feel free to let me know.

No comments: