FB offers full metrics
Feedburner now offers full metrics, not just for feeds. You’ll need to add a bit of code to your main, single and — Feedburner’s inline help missed this — to page template. Feedburner will then start recording every hit on the page, post, page, everything.
But what happens when when Feedburner site is down, for example? Does the site stop loading? If I can see, the Feedburner code, sort of repeats in every post, because of where they want us to park the code.
That’s a ton of code per post, I think. Plus, you’ll need to add to your asides hack as well after post-content tag. Look at this source. There appears more Feedburner code than my own posts :). I’ll try it for a while. But I think the load speed is visibly slow.
Update: No, I don’t like it. Too much code and it’s too damn slow. I’m taking the code off. I’d rather like a one liner in the header section, like Google Analytics does. Feedburner’s implementation is a bit too much, just for a little more in-depth stat. I wouldn’t want my site burndened because of tracking metrics! That is just lame.
Hi -
Thanks for the feedback. You raise several good points, and I thought I’d share a couple responses. On the “too much code” point, I recognize your point - especially on pages that stack multiple blog posts. That said, we do this in part because posts will show up in multiple places on a blog - this notion of ‘micro’ content isn’t all that well understood by most analytics apps, and we want to make sure that we accurately capture this scenario as best as we can.
That said, we’re always looking at ways to do things efficiently, so we’ll huddle on ways to streamline the javascript delivery.
Regarding any potential downtime, we will be publishing some more detailed info about our contingency plans in place. We manage feed content for more than 300,000 publishers currently, and handle hundreds of millions of feed requests each day. We’ve put together a very scalable, redundant architecture that will ensure that we won’t negatively impact a publisher’s site should something unexpected happen on our side… but that’s not all that specific. Like I said, I’ll put together a note on our blog in the near future that lays out what we do so that you can adequately assess whether our network ops policies are sufficient enough to rely on.
With regards to specific load times, we’ve tested this pretty thoroughly and haven’t noticed significant lags: if you want to use the service but are seeing degraded page loads, drop us a line at feedback@feedburner.com - it’s possible something’s not working as it should and we may be able to isolate and resolve it.
Thanks again for the feedback; keep in touch!
Regards,
Rick Klau
Jan 5, 07 at 23:34VP, Publisher Services
FeedBurner
Rick, thanks for the prompt feedback. But, I am not impressed with what I see — particularly with regards to load times. I have a big fat pipe of internet connection here and I could still see some difference, with posts actually loading in sequence. I am never used to seeing things like that. They load from the db in a snap (no cache issues here either).
Every time you feed a line of code, the browser has to load it. And it loads one snippet of code per post, if you’re on the main page, if the user were to follow your recommendation for getting stats. I quite understand that at this moment, that is the best you’ve got. But that’s a lot of code.
In addition, as I mentioned in my post, if for some reason, Feedburner’s responses become slower: in loading, inspite of FB’s best efforts, the browser needs to time-out on each snippet on each post and then it begins to become a drag.
I would love to have FB’s site stats, but not the way you ask users to implement. Stat script should load just once — that would be okay with me.
Jan 9, 07 at 18:10