This was sent in by Mark Wielgus via email. Feedburner has a fairly comprehensive free stats package, which lets you break down feed statistics by feed reader, by browser, by date, by popular items, and the like. Or at least this is useful enough for the average blogger (advanced ones might want to use the premium service). And for this reason, I personally use Feedburner to manage most of my blog feeds.
However, some people might have some concerns with directing users to Feedburner.
For instance, being a third-party service provider, some might have issues with how their content and statistics are being used (the popular TWiT podcasters netcasters once made a big deal out of this way back in 2005). And in the event Feedburner goes out of business, then you would be losing all those feed subscribers.
Mark provides a solution, where you just have to add a few lines of code to your RSS feed file (in wordpress, for instance, this is the wp-rss, wp-rss2 and wp-atom PHP files in the main folder). You can check out Mark’s site for the step-by-step instructions and even a video tutorial.
It appears Feedburner is all right with this hack. Mark says the Feedburner CTO contacted him to say the code might not reflect accurate stats from some desktop-based feed readers, and that Feedburner is working on fixing this.
