••• Jared Bangs has written the nice WordPress plugin MintBirdFeeder that modifies the WordPress feeds in a way that the site tracking system Mint can report the feed and seed usage. I was using his plugin for quite a time but noticed some shortcomings. As documented the plugin does not support comments feeds. Unfortunately it also misreports the feed usage for the Articles feed. How so? Let’s have a look at it.
WordPress serves three types of feeds:
- main articles feeds
e. g. http://your.wordpress.blog/feed/
- main comment feeds
e. g. http://your.wordpress.blog/comments/feed/
- comment feed for particular articles
e.g. http://your.wordpress.blog/article/feed/
The MintBirdFeeder plugin does not support the second type and it reports the third type as of the first type. Since many people are subscribed just to the comments of my post WP-Plugin SitemapTags in order to stay informed of recent changes I found that these subscribers where actually reported as subscribers of the Articles feed. Since I’m interested in correct numbers of subscribers of the three types of feeds I felt the urge to write a replacement for Jareds plugin.
And here it is: BirdFeederWP. It does support the two types of comment feeds mentioned above and reports them apart from the subscribers of the main Articles feed. As with Jareds plugin Mint and the Mint plugin BirdFeeder by Shaun Inman must be installed before you activate BirdFeederWP from the WordPress plugin panel. No further action should be necessary. The actual number of subscribers won’t change dramatically; but you may find that a lot of subscribers belong to a different category and are not regular readers of your blog but just interested in the comments of a particular post.
The plugin has been tested with WP from version 2.1 up to 2.3.
Comments and (heaven forbid) bug reports are welcome. Just post a comment here or send a mail.
Download: » BirdFeederWP-104.zip (Version 1.0.4 • 01.10.2007)