DeadRooster.com

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WEEKEND PLANS ABORTED. The plan was to take a few days off, mix up a pitcher of margaritas, relax on the back porch and finish reading Cluck: Murder Most Fowl. The trouble was that the temperature here in the beautiful wine country of southern California shot up to over eight-million-degrees–or, in the real world, about 102 F (39 C), and it was way too hot to sit out there and read. I think I even heard some grapes popping on the vines.

Anyway, I really needed to get this reading done because I had promised Eric Knapp, author of Cluck, that I’d get a review of his book posted this week. Lucky for me, the temperature is supposed to back-off to 86 F (30 C) today which should be just fine for reading in the shade. I am only about half-way through the book, but I should be able to finish it today and have the review posted by Thursday.

Over the weekend, while I was stuck inside watching cartoons and sipping margaritas, a thought occurred to me: after all the extra traffic from the CNN story, I wonder how many of the new visitors converted to RSS feed subscribers? I don’t really push the RSS feed subscriptions, but with all those extra visitors you would think at least some of them would do it.

Some of them did: Two of them.

I always wondered why my feedcount looked so anemic compared with other, similar blogs. I guess part of it can be chalked-up to the fact that I just haven’t been around for very long; but, it still seems like I should have more subscribers. So, I did a little research and discovered something very interesting that made me feel a lot better.

…and, I doubled my feedcount in 24 hours.

I’m not going to get too much into the inner workings of WordPress except to tell you that there are several RSS feeds hiding in there and if you use feedburner it just adds another one. What this means is that there are feed subscribers scattered all over your blog, some of which you probably don’t even know about, and the feedburner feedcount displayed on your blog is probably only a fraction of the actual number of subscribers you have.

If you operate a self-hosted WordPress blog there is an easy solution. Feedburner has acquired “Feedsmith,” a plugin originally developed by Steve Smith that takes your maverick RSS feed subscribers and converts them all to Feedburner subscribers.

Installation is a breeze, just download the plugin, unzip, pop it into your plugins folder, activate it, and then set it up with your feedburner RSS address in your WordPress dashboard.

DOWNLOAD FEEDSMITH FOR WORDPRESS

FEEDSMITH INSTALLATION INSTRUCTIONS

Remember, Feedburner updates their stats only once a day so you might have to wait as long as 48 hours to see the full results.

A few notes:

1) obviously if you are a blogspot blog this does you no good, however, it’s probably a safe bet that “blogger” blogs already convert all the RSS feeds (I would be a little surprised to find out that Google doesn’t incorporate this technology into their own blogging platform).

2) This is not yet available for WordPress.com blogs—hopefully they will get around to it at some point.

3) I got to thinking that some bloggers may want to keep some of the feeds separate. If that’s you, there is a hack I found by Abhijit Nadgouda that might do the trick.

4) When I first started this blog (January 1st, 2008) I didn’t immediately start out using Feedburner (I didn’t even know what Feedburner was at that point), so that may account for my unusually high gains–mileage may vary.

Note: If you want to help get Dead Rooster’s feedcount up to a respectable, display-worthy level, you can subscribe to my full RSS feed by clicking the orange RSS Subscription button at the top of the sidebar at right. You know you want to!