WordPress.org

Author: Gabriele Tomassetti

A feed is a very useful way to deliver contents, because it contains only informations. There isn't any theme or graphical amenity, only data. Because of this it doesn't matter how many people simply "see" your feeds, but how many of them want to know them. They are people that trust you, so it's valuable their number. This plugin tries to do this work for you.

Basically it assigns a (pseudo-random) ID to every person that read your feed. It's a technique that many people on the web have thought, although its use isn't much widespread. Since it dinamically assigns an ID to every request of your feed (that doesn't have already one, obviously), you must block the Search engine bots to access to your feeds, you can use the included robots.txt if you are not able to write your own (do not overwrite an existing one, however, append the contents if you already have one robots.txt).

Moreover there will be surely some problems with the old subscribers of your feed, they will continue to see you feed as before and will receive every time a new ID so they won't be counted.

At the moment you can let them be counted simply lowering the number of requests needed to be counted as a subscribers to 1 (default: 2) and lowering the number of days from the last use after that the subscriber is no more counted as a subscriber to 1 (default: 2). Obviously this isn't a perfect solutions, but this is an alpha release.

There is an options page under the Options » FeedMaster tab and another one to show stats under Dashboard » FeedMaster, now with graphs. You can choose to show your subscriber, in the dashboard and/or in the sidebar, in the latter one both in the graphical way and simply as text.

It's a beta release, do not use in production sites. If you want to take some risks install it only if your able to manage databases, wordpress plugins, php and crashes without becoming mad. Since it's a beta it will delete all data created when you deactivated it.

I don't speak english fluently because I don't use it in, but I can understand it well so if you have suggestions feel free to write them in comments.