Fedafi - Wordpress Plugin for RSS

We have just released v1.0.2 of the Fedafi RSS Wordpress Plugin, download it here.

The new release has some feature changes, code optimization and bug fixes.

New Features

1. We have started to introduce the new statistics engine into the code, this will now show subscribers by online service where available. So you will be able to see how many Bloglines, Rmail, Pageflakes, Netvibes (and many more) subscribers you have. It’s available by day and uses some Ajax to drop down, it looks like this:

   

2. We have also added referrer tracking so you can see where people come from when they click on article links. This of course is limited to where a referrer is available. This means if a Pageflakes user clicks an article you will know about it. But if a desktop reader clicks one it will just show ‘Desktop/Mobile reader’, like this:

   

Bug Fixes

1. We fixed a bug that caused the stylesheet to be ignored if you used a different folder to install Wordpress (different from the index page)
2. Fixed a ‘null’ return bug in the stats routine

We recommend everyone updates to the latest version. Please report any bugs here.

If you use the default Wordpress permalink structure for your blog then many people may subscribe to your current feed using an URL something like this

domain.com/?feed=rss2

If you install the Fedafi Wordpress Plugin you need to redirect this to the new feed so that your subscribers don’t get lost.

To do this you need to add code similar to this in your sites .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^feed=(rss2)$
RewriteRule ^.*$ http://yourdomain.com/rss.php? [R,L]


We are just finishing off working on the next release of the Wordpress plugin that will add to the statistics engine to give more accuracy and detail, allowing you to drill down by day. One thing that has made all of the work much tougher is the lack of standardization regarding information supplied by user agents.

Some, such as Netvibes, Pageflakes, Bloglines and more have used a standard format, like this:

Service_Name/release (http://www.domain.com; 1 subscriber)

This is great, it says who and how many. However others seem to use their own standard, such as:

FeedLounge (http://dl0.feedlounge.com/), 1 subscribers, next refresh in approx. 3600 seconds

Others don’t supply any subscriber information, such as

Excite Europe Feed Agent (http://mix.excite.co.uk/)
Google

Come on Excite, let us know how many people are reading, we want to know.

I know some ‘user agent purists’ will say that subscriber details shouldn’t be there, but they are and will continue to be added, let’s just hope they add in a standard way.

Anyway, here’s a sneak preview at the new stats engine;

Okay I got dragged away from debugging and think it’s worth making a post regarding Firefox 2.0 and how it deals with RSS feeds. A couple of users have contacted us about the way it disregards the style sheet and uses it’s own, so instead of this:

You get this:

Although much has been said about this here and elsewhere the fix is quite simple (although some appear to have taken a HTML hammer to crack an RSS nut). It’s probably worth saying I didn’t think people would have such an issue with it, it does pretty much what our stylesheet does, not as informative but close and I was wrong.

The problem is that Firefox are three years too late with this, three years ago this would have made a huge difference to RSS uptake, now we all have solutions and many don’t like applications forcing their own solution on them.

We are listening, so in the next release of our plugin we will add an option so you can choose to accept the default Firefox style or override it with your own (the one provided by us).

Fedafi RSS Wordpress Plugin (Beta)

Today we released the beta version of the Fedafi Wordpress Plugin. Find out more and download it FREE here

Features

Fedafi Wordpress Plugin is just that, a plugin for Wordpress, it creates a full text valid RSS 2.0 feed from your Wordpress blog adds a style sheet, tracks subscribers and tracks clicks on articles. Plus it will allow you to sell advertising space right in your feed through our publisher network

• Auto Creates a Valid RSS 2.0 Feed
• Full text feed
• Realtime update
• Valid RSS for IE7
• Fedafi Installs Easily
• Upload the files
• Activate the plugin
• View your stats
• Tracking is a key part of Fedafi
• Track overall hits on your feed
• Track unique hits on your feed
• Track by user agent
• Track clicks on outbound links by article
• See statistics by month
• Monetize your feed
• Activate advertising
• Get adverts from the Fedafi Publisher Network

Requirements

Fedafi Wordpress Plugin was developed on various Linux web servers, including Plesk and cPanel, that use Apache, PHP and MySQL using version 2.0.2 and above of Wordpress.

• Version 2.0.2 and above of Wordpress (hasn’t been tested on anything below this)
• A website on a Linux webserver with Apache
• PHP 4.3 or over
• MySQL 4.0 or over
• Ioncube loaders (included bundled with the install package)

Instal Fedafi Wordpress Plugin

Install is easy

• Download the plugin
• Upload to your Wordpress install
• Activate the plugin
• Adjust your template to the new feed URL or use a 301 redirect to it

Upload the files
Download the zip file and unzip, the contents will look like this:

The two files you can see:

• rss.php
• fedclick.php

Go in the root folder of your Wordpress install, this is the folder that contains wp-config.php

The folder named ‘fedafi’ needs to be uploaded to your plugins folder. You need to upload the whole folder so that your plugins folder now has a folder within it called ‘fedafi’

Activate the plugin
You now need to go to your Wordpress admin in your browser and click the ‘plugins’ link

Here you will see the ‘fedafi’ plugin, click the ‘activate’ link

If you now click the ‘dashboard’ link you will see a new sub-link called ‘Fedafi’

Click this and you will see your feed details

Redirect your feed URL
The URL to your new feed will be http://yourdomain/rss.php

You can edit your template to use this new URL or edit the .htaccess file in the root folder of your Wordpress install and add a 301 redirect

The redirect should look something like this:

Redirect 301 /feed http://yourdomain/rss.php