With Performancing's Metrics package about to be released as a public beta, someone asked the question whether or not it could track RSS usage. To be able to do this for regular HTML web pages, a piece of Javascript that calls a tracking program - say in PHP - and accesses a database is enough. The Javascript code is inserted somewhere into a website or weblog's page template.

However, RSS/ RDF/ Atom feeds run on the XML file format. The problem is that while ECMAscript (the standardized version of Javascript) is supposed to be able to run for any parser that handles XML, this is not necessarily true in practice. So for the present time, we can't just insert a piece of code into an XML feed file.

So how then do services like Feedburner track web feed metrics? I don't know the specifics of their set up, so this is an educated guess. What they actually do is track requests to each feed URL, behind which is hiding a script in PHP or some other web programming language, and store visitor information in a database. The script's name is invisible in the URL that you help Feedburner create for your feed.

So each time your Feedburner feed URL is called, by any agent including bots/spiders, web browsers or standalone feed readers, this info is stored in their database. Your feed's contents are then served up dynamically in XML format.

This means that given the way Performancing Metrics works, it cannot track web feeds without a separate tracking system. This is true of any similarly-functioning third-party web analytics package, including Google Analytics, because they require a piece of code to be inserted in your web pages. So until there's a dependable way to do so in XML-based web feeds, tracking RSS readership requires filtering a feed through a script. And if I'm wrong, I'll print a retraction here :)

>> Raj Kumar Dash, http://www.chameleonintegration.com/

Technorati Tags: rsscases, rss cases, rss metrics, web metrics, web analytics