WordPress: Keep a Track of Every Possible Feed Subscriber

When I started blogging on this site, I had not begun to use Feedburner for managing the feed subscription for my site. By the time I started to use Feedburner’s feed subscription service, there were plenty of users already using the direct feed from my site. The direct feeds on my sites can be accessed using [bloghash.com/feed/] and [bloghash.com/feed/atom/]. While checking the log files on the web server, I saw many requests for the feed on my site and I wanted to keep a track of all those direct feed requests as well. Analyzing the log file and keeping a count of those requests and their source was not something I wanted to do on a regular basis. Doing a Google search for a possible solution was helpful and here is what I found.

A FeedBurner Plugin

Using the [FeedBurner Plugin], I could redirect all the feed requests from my site to Feedburner. The plugin can detect all possible incoming feed requests and user-agents, redirect them to your feedburner feed. It does not use .htaccess for redirection, instead uses your existing permalink structure, even on Windows. After installing the plugin in your site, all the feed requests to http://your-site.com/feed/ and http://your-site.com/feed/atom/ will be redirected to http://feeds.feedburner.com/your-feed. The plugin is a configuration page on which you can mention your feedburner’s feed URL and optionally even forward your comments feed to Feedburner.

The best part about this plugin is that it uses 307 redirect which will effectively retain the information contained in POST method using which a request was sent to your site. With a 307 redirect, the browser reissues the POST request with the original HTTP POST data to the new location, which is much better than a 302-Object Moved redirect. The advantage is that when you disable/uninstall the plugin, the feeds will still be accessible from your site without any impact on the way users access your feeds.

Now, all my subscribers are redirected to Feedburner and I track every possible feed subscriber on my site. You can try to access [http://bloghash.com/feed/] in your browser and it will redirect you to [http://feeds.feedburner.com/bloghash]. After installing and setting up the plugin, I saw an increase in the number of subscribers by 50% on feedburner stats page, which helps me keep a track of all subscribers. I recommend that you install it in your blogs too!