i discovered something this week about Feedburner… Google may well be in the process of shutting it down completely.
All my subscriber numbers dropped to zero over the past few days, and on all my feeds (about 25 total, for blogs and for podcasts).
It took a while for me to find out some news about what’s going on (the implication that Google might be blocking search results about Feedburner being broken is a concern, as well), but Google let feedburner.jp lapse back in July without warning, causing everyone who’d been using feeds.feedburner.jp for service to lose everything.
They are also shutting down the Feedburner API in October, and had already shut down their Feedburner blog and the Feedburner Twitter account within recent months.
And might Piwik eventually support other services like Feedblitz (which I just recently found out is what Copyblogger switched to ages ago because of Feedburner unreliability)?
WTF I hope they don’t actually shut down the feed server or it will destroy thousands of sites! including piwik.org which uses feedburner for feeds… (which was, probably, a bad idea).
however, we’d need to parse the headers to get the number of subscribers, and maybe set a custom variable with the numbers of subscribers (ie. when google reader requests a feed it tells how many people are subscribed to the feed). let me know if you get something going. indede it’s interesting and could be documented in a FAQ or blog post. thx
For now, the feeds seem to still work, it’s just there’s no data being recorded in the accounts managing the feeds, they all display zero subscribers, zero reach, zero everything.
Their support blog says they’re working on it, but the rumors are flying fast amongst bloggers that this may be the signal for the death knell. I know the people using Feedburner for email campaigns cannot be happy campers right now.
Here are the posts I found with some info:
This is one she posted a month ago about switching (wish I’d read it then instead of this morning):
The fact that Feedblitz can also monetize RSS feeds is good info, since that’s what we currently do with several of our news feeds, and they don’t charge much for folks doing RSS only.
It’s the metrics I care most about (as well as our marketing guy!), so if Piwik can measure my self-hosted news and podcast feeds, that could be an alternative to Feedburner. May not help immediately with putting ads in the feed, but the more I think about it, the more I think I can write that code myself… we just wouldn’t have all of the feed data in one cozy overview page like Feedburner or Feedblitz provides.
Unless Piwik could create an “All Feeds” page like there’s one for “All Websites”
Read a lot about this kind of features and for now I am parsing the apache logs from each server which is accessible to my visitors / users / clients to get their Social Media feeds from Facebook, Twitter, Google+ etc. Probably you know Piwik is able to read those logs to generate statistics.
Besides this method I am working on a few other methods. Lot of experimenting but probably a few nice things will be available.
