Rogue Wolves

I've decided to try out the FeedBurner StandardStats feature to keep an eye on various site statistics such as referrers, geographic location of visitors, browsers used, etc.

Note: This is something the Drupal logs could do a much better job at. A nice dashboard similar to what StandardStats gives you with pretty graphs, etc.

The FeedBurner instructions to integrate StandardStats into your site didn't work well for me. There are Drupal specific instructions, but they fail to mention which template file you should put the code into. Here is the code FeedBurner suggests:

<script src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~s/YOURFEEDNAME?i=http://www.example.com<?php print $node_url ?>" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script>

You will need to change YOURFEEDNAME and www.example.com to your site specific info. After some reading I found that $node_url is only available in Node.tpl.php and not in Page.tpl.php so the code must go into Node.tpl.php. At first I thought it was working but then I noticed that for anonymous users (the majority of site visitors) the script was not showing up in the html. After a bit of head scratching I realized this must be a cache issue. Now how to clear the Drupal cache? I thought there used to be a button on one of the admin screens to do this? I can't seem to find it (if it ever existed) so I had to clear the cache the manual way: I truncated the cache_page table in mysql. Bingo! Things were working now.

Note: Drupal really should have an admin feature to clear the cache.

After some more testing I noticed a problem with this technique. Using the Node.tpl.php will cause the FeedBurner script to be repeated for every node that is on the page. For node view/edit pages there is only one node so this is not an issue, but for the front page or a node list page (term pages, etc) the script will be included for each node. This means that if a user visits the front page of your site in FeedBurner StandardStats will report the user visited every node listed on the front page. Needless to say this will skew your stats. I'd rather be more accurate and know that they visited the front page.

To fix this behaviour I decided to not put the script in Node.tpl.php. Instead I put code in Page.tpl.php so there is only one notification to FeedBurner StandardStats: whether the user is on the front page or on a particular node page. Since the $node_url variable is only applicable to Node.tpl.php I needed a new technique to report the node url. My first attempt was to add this code to the Page.tpl.php:

<script src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~s/YOURFEEDNAME?i=http://www.example.com/<?php print $node->path ?>" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script>

This script worked for logged in users, but mysteriously $node->path always returned blank for anonymous users. After some digging on Drupal.org, I found this bug report about $node->path returning null for anonymous users. They have a good work around: Use url("node/$node->nid") instead of $node->path

My working script is as follows:

<script src="http://feeds.feedburner.com/~s/YOURFEEDNAME?i=http://www.example.com<?php if ($node->nid != "") print url("node/$node->nid"); ?>" type="text/javascript" charset="utf-8"></script>

The if ($node->nid != "") will only append the node url if we are currently on a node page. This isn't a perfect solution, since this will only return a specific node url or your root url (ex: www.example.com). A better solution would always return the actual URL being visited whether it is a search page, term page, node page, etc. Consider that a future enhancement...

I also wanted to mention Dave Ried's new FeedBurner Module. I have not yet tried it out but it sounds like it has great promise and will eliminate the need to do much of this kind of stuff manually:

Integrates Drupal with the services provided by FeedBurner. Currently this module provides the means to redirect requests for your site's feeds to user-specified/created FeedBurner feeds. Special user agents, like FeedBurner and Feed Validator (this can be customized) are still allowed access to the direct feeds so there is no need for any special .htaccess hacking.

Update: Here is a link to another way you can integrate FeedBurner StandardStats.

I recently decided to play around with FeedBurner and get some useful stats on my RSS feed. If you ever wanted to know how many people subscribe to your feed, what they use, and track hits then you should check out FeedBurner. Plus it's free! (you can pay for a pro account that gives you even more ways of slicing and dicing your stats)

Instructions for integrating FeedBurner into Drupal

In order to use FeedBurner you need to tell FeedBurner where your RSS feed exists and then you need to direct all of your site visitors to subscribe not to your Drupal feed but rather to the feed that FeedBurner will create for you. This way all your feed traffic will pass through FeedBurner so they can calculate all those fancy stats.

There are several ways to integrate this. Here are a few:

1. You could setup FeedBurner to point directly to your Drupal feed and then modify your site theme so that the RSS links point to the FeedBurner RSS url. Plus you'd also want to modify the RSS url for autodiscovery (the feature that lets your browser or feed reader detect that an RSS feed is present on the current webpage). To change the autodiscovery feature you can follow this thread on Drupal.org. Now when someone subscribes to your site they will use your FeedBurner RSS feed so you can track stats.
2. The above option has a big problem. Those subscribers that have already subscribed to your RSS feed will still be grabbing your feed from Drupal rather than from FeedBurner. So all your current subscribers will be ignored in the FeedBurner stats. Blah. To get around this you can modify your .htaccess file and redirect your traffic to your drupal rss feed to the feedburner rss feed! Aha! It's fixed! Um, not quite... If you do this you will break FeedBurner because it also uses your drupal rss feed! So you'd be redirecting feed burner back to itself! Frustrated yet? So in order for this to work you need Feedburner to have a special "hidden" url to get to your RSS feed (that doesn't get redirected). This allows FeedBurner to get to your drupal feed and subscribers to your Drupal feed to get redirected to the FeedBurner feed. Then you could do the other hacks in option 1 to make sure new subscribers use your FeedBurner feed too.
3. You SMRT people out there may have picked up on something. Why do we need to do all that stuff in Option 1 if we are already redirecting our Drupal feed url to FeedBurner? Good call! Simple answer? You don't! So this option is the simplified way to integrate FeedBurner. It involves creating a special "hidden" url so FeedBurner can get to your Drupal RSS feed and some rewrite rules in your .htaccess file to redirect all traffic to your drupal feed to your FeedBurner feed. That's it! This will take care of new subscribers to your feed and current subscribers with minimal fuss. This option also lets you have control over your feed since all feed requests goes through your site.

More details inside...