Welcome to Hell–Enjoy Your Feedburner Margarita!
Photo credit: riptheskull
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!
Dead Rooster is the online home of 
Gosh, you’re becoming our Humor Blog Web Guru. A Funny Blogging Yoda with non-reversed verbal communications of sorts. Congrats on getting your RSS feed stuff sorted out and discovering other fans waiting in the wings (pun intended) of the Dead Rooster.
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@Jenn,
Thanks!
I have a few pure humor posts I’m working on but every time I start working on them something work-related happens to slow me down. Hopefully, I won’t lose too many non-blogging readers until I can get back on track. That is my main concern right now.
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Oh, you clever sleuth, you.
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I don’t think you’ll lose anyone– thoughtful content is thoughtful content, no matter what the angle.
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So if we sign up and you don’t keep us laughing like you been doing we can get a refund?
Bloggers need to support one another 100%
I’m signing up -thats Alexa is looking tight
Thanks Brother Keep up the Excellent work
PS gave you a little props yesterday-towards the bottom:)
http://potpolitics.com/?p=152
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@John,
Dude! You are awesome!
I really appreciate that.
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Ok, so I went looking at the 3 bookstores in my area and none had Cluck. I am very po’ed. Means I gotta order it and I hate that cuz you gotta wait on the frickin mail. Damnit all to hell and back.
Secondly, my feedcount sucks which tells me that either a. you are wrong about Feedsmith cuz I have had it a long time, or b. people just don’t dig me.
The bastards.
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@petra,
None of the bookstores in my area had it either. However, you have GOT to order it. TRUST ME you will love it. I am going to be doing a review (probably on Friday now).
As far as Feedsmith goes, my feedcount STILL sucks, but it’s twice as good as it was before I installed it.
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I am officially a feed fan now.
It took me a while to figure it all out as well, but my subscriptions have now reached over 100. Yours surely will surpass that soon!!
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@Chelle,
Very nice!
100 subscribers would be great. That’s my current goal, but I’ve got a ways to go.
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Awesome. I might try this. Although, when I moved to WP, I just transferred my feedburner feed (from Blogger) to my self-hosted WP site. I deleted the default WP feed altogether. So I think people are only getting one option. I think. I dunno… this is worth trying nonetheless. I seem to be stuck on a magic number of subscribers and would like to gain more.
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@Jillian,
If, right out of the box, you deleted the default WordPress feeds, you probably don’t need this plugin.
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I can so relate with the frustration of trying to get traffic and subscribers. It can be a full-time job.
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