Two weeks ago, my RSS feed stats dropped with almost 80%. That was quite alarming, but when I asked around or looked it up on the WordPress forum nobody else seemed to have the problem.
Was it something I wrote? I wondered what the reason was, but knew that the impact was a bit abrupt to be a result of writing quality or whatever.
Yesterday I found out. Apparently WordPress has tweaked the feed stats recently, explaining that the initial feed stats were artificially high (damn).
“When a service like Netvibes gets very large they start needing lots of machines to do the work, so these requests may start arriving from different machines. There may be as many as ten machines each reporting “30 subscribers” which makes it seem as though there were 300 subscribers. This was making your feed stats report a falsely high number of subscribers.”
Back to earth ;-) By the way, anybody know how I can replace the default WordPress.com feed by Feedburner?
Tags: wordpress, feedreader, rss feed, statistics
'Cross The Breeze 
You can’t.
You can of course have your feed burnt by Feedburner, and add it as a link in your blogroll, but you’ll not be able to replace the feed autodiscovery info in the WordPress.com template, nor will the old feed redirect.
As soon as WordPress enables custom dns as a service, there’s a migration path towards a self-hosted solution – your wordpress.com will be redirected to e.g. crossthebreeze.com, and you can make crossthebreeze.com point to your own hosted solution you control completely…
Thanks Pascal!
You can change the rss/atom link manually in your code after you subscribed at Feedburner. This I guess is what most of us do. Don’t know what happens with auto-discovery as Pascal mentioned.
Thanks Claudio, but that only works when you host WordPress yourself right? I have no access to the code on WordPress.com
Domain mapping has arrived:
http://wordpress.com/blog/2006/10/24/domain-mapping-registration/
http://wordpress.com/forums/topic.php?id=4766&replies=49
But whether completing the second step is worth the trouble, is another question…
Second step being: setting up your own wordpress hosting just for the sake of having feedburner stats
Thanks Pascal, I did indeed use the domain mapping and I’m just waiting for all changes to take place. And indeed, this is a really nice change, I don’t think I want to go further just for the sake of the feedburner stats.