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How to tell someone is an RSS subscriber?
KVW
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I've seen blogs run contests that require people to subscribe to their RSS feed to enter or be elegible to win a prize. How does this work? I was planning to run a contest on my own blog in August and can't seem to figure out a way to distinguish who's an RSS subscriber or to randomly select someone from my subscribers. I use Feedburner for my RSS feed, but can't find any information regarding it on Google. Everything comes up either as a "how to run a contest" telling me to offer prizes to RSS feed subscribers or is itself a contest asking me to sign up but nothing telling me how to actually do this myself.
So, how do these blogs tell who to give the prizes to? Do I need a plugin of some kind? Is it using a different feed other than Feed Burner?
So, how do these blogs tell who to give the prizes to? Do I need a plugin of some kind? Is it using a different feed other than Feed Burner?
KVW on
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At its heart, FeedBurner is just a way of managing an RSS feed. An RSS feed is an XML document that consists of a bunch of 'items.' Maybe these items are blog posts, or podcasts, or whatever. When you add or change items, you put the new version up on the Web somewhere at some URL that you advertise. Then, people with RSS readers regularly check and download that URL, maybe once every hour or day while they're online. This is done with a simple HTTP GET.
At its heart, FeedBurner just makes it easier to manage the updating and posting of that XML document.
Now, unless you have some setup whereby users have to register and login before they go to your RSS URL, you can't track individual subscribers. The problem is equivalent to "how can I get a list of all the people that have clicked on this webpage in the past week?" By default, you just can't do this. Now you COULD do it if you had some sort of authentication mechanism. You could use HTTP basic authentication or cookies, for example, to force users to login before they download your RSS page. I'm not sure whether feed readers or FeedBurner supports these things, though.
The best you can do by default is to look at your HTTP logs for, say, a one-week period and get a list of all the IP addresses that have hit your page. If you wanted to be more specific, you could look only for ones that get your page at a regular interval, or that use certain User-Agents, to try to separate subscribers from bots and curious one-time visitors. Of course, the problem is you can't map an IP addess back to individual users.
FeedBurner does offer an Email Subscription Service, whereby people can "subscribe" to your content via email. In this case, you would have their email addresses, but this still doesn't give you an opportunity to get a list of all the randoms that are out there with a feed pointed at your RSS URL.
If you find that FeedBurner has a service for doing this, post it here, because I'd be interested to know how it's implemented.
And most of the sites I've seen do these contests don't have log-ins or anything that could track the readers in anyway, so I dont think there's any log checking or database related queries.
I'm still testing out the best way to do this, but I think just making a post and backdating it so it does not show upon the front page of your blog and thus people visiting the blog through other means can't see it without knowing the exact address. Then, put an email form or contest entry page or whatever on that page and it's a feed subscriber centric contest.
Im still trying to find out if there's a way to make entire posts that are only visible to subscribers, but, for now, FeedFlares should solve my problem.