A Commentary on the Passing Scene by
Robert Paul Wolff
rwolff@afroam.umass.edu
Saturday, January 8, 2011
QUARTER MILLION
Just wanted to take note of the fact that this blog has passed the quarter million visits milestone. Of course, if you deduct my visits, it probably drops to thirty-seven, but, hey, who's counting?
A neato service where your server sends a notification and text summary of all of your updates to people who have subscribed to the RSS feed (well, 'send' isn't exactly accurate, but never mind about that). Since the default 'summary' is the entire post, it allows the people who subscribe to the feed to read all of your updates without loading the page (but they can't see the comments without coming here). You could change the RSS settings so the RSS subscribers only see a snippet, as done by many people who depend on page views to raise advertising revenue (actually, probably not, the people who run the Blogger services can do it and may not have allowed you access to that bit of functionality), but it isn't clear why you'd do that.
I don't think there's a way to track how many people use it, but I could be wrong. I checked the Blogger control panel (since I have a never-updated, zero-traffic blog), and while I found options to fiddle with the size of the summary sent, I couldn't see anything about tracking RSS subscribers.
RSS is one of those acronyms whose meaning has changed over time, but these days most people call it Really Simple Syndication if they call it anything.
I Googled RSS. It turns out to mean Rich Site Summary [I assume this is a reference to rich text, whatever that is, which pops up all the time.] I shall assume that in addition to the little band of faithful readers, there are also millions of others checking what we say here. We might as well assume that it is millions [and not dozens]. Who can say no?
But the number also probably does not reflect the readers such as myself who read your RSS feed.
ReplyDeleteGood grief. What is an RSS feed?
ReplyDeleteA neato service where your server sends a notification and text summary of all of your updates to people who have subscribed to the RSS feed (well, 'send' isn't exactly accurate, but never mind about that). Since the default 'summary' is the entire post, it allows the people who subscribe to the feed to read all of your updates without loading the page (but they can't see the comments without coming here). You could change the RSS settings so the RSS subscribers only see a snippet, as done by many people who depend on page views to raise advertising revenue (actually, probably not, the people who run the Blogger services can do it and may not have allowed you access to that bit of functionality), but it isn't clear why you'd do that.
ReplyDeleteWho knew? Is there any way to find out how many people do that? And, by the way, what does RSS stand for? I am so clueless.
ReplyDeleteI don't think there's a way to track how many people use it, but I could be wrong. I checked the Blogger control panel (since I have a never-updated, zero-traffic blog), and while I found options to fiddle with the size of the summary sent, I couldn't see anything about tracking RSS subscribers.
ReplyDeleteRSS is one of those acronyms whose meaning has changed over time, but these days most people call it Really Simple Syndication if they call it anything.
I Googled RSS. It turns out to mean Rich Site Summary [I assume this is a reference to rich text, whatever that is, which pops up all the time.] I shall assume that in addition to the little band of faithful readers, there are also millions of others checking what we say here. We might as well assume that it is millions [and not dozens]. Who can say no?
ReplyDelete