rss feed subscribers

[Robin James]

Is there a way to track RSS Feed Subscribers in ColdFusion?

[Dave Watts]

Yes. But you haven't provided enough detail in your question to get a more detailed answer.

Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software

http://www.figleaf.com/

http://training.figleaf.com/

Fig Leaf Software is a Veteran-Owned Small Business (VOSB) on

GSA Schedule, and provides the highest caliber vendor-authorized

instruction at our training centers, online, or onsite.

Read this before you post:

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/607238

[Robin James]

I'm not sure what else to say.

I have created an RSS Feed on a website built in CF for subscribers to join.  How can I keep track of how many subscribers join?

When the viewer selects join RSS Feed, it takes them to an RSS Feed page that outputs all of the RSS Feeds.  They may select Subscribe to this Feed.  At this point, I would like to track how many people have subscribed in a table or some other way.

[cfjedimaster]

The thing is - a RSS feed is just XML. It doesn't - automatically -

require a 'subscription'. A client program subscribes to a RSS feed by

just fetching it in an interval.

[Owainnorth]

Quite. You can record how many people click the "Subscribe" button, but even that isn't the best of tests. As people can find about or subscribe to your RSS feed in many different ways, I'd suggest just monitoring the unique IPs hitting that URL in your web logs.

[Dave Watts]

Subscribing to a feed happens in the feed client, not on the server. As far as you can tell, you simply have some number of requests for the feed URL. So, you can count unique requests for that URL (by IP address, or by generating unique variants of the feed URL when it's first presented) when it's requested by the client.

Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software

http://www.figleaf.com/

http://training.figleaf.com/

Fig Leaf Software is a Veteran-Owned Small Business (VOSB) on

GSA Schedule, and provides the highest caliber vendor-authorized

instruction at our training centers, online, or onsite.

Read this before you post:

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/607238

[Robin James]

I don't fully understand how RSS feeds work.  How is the client program "fetching it [the feed] in an interval"?  Is there a way to offer different client programs on the RSS feed page or is that determined by the browser?

[Adam Cameron.]

An "RSS feed" is basically a file format, plain and simple.  Just like the HTML standard describes a file format.

There is no magic going in: a RSS client application simply requests the RSS document, and then displays it.  Just like a web browser will request a web page and display it.  Some RSS client applications can be set to automate this request process, re-requesting the document after a given time interval.

Did you, like, Google "RSS" and read up on it?

The Wikipedia page - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS - does as good a job of describing how it works as any.

--

Adam

[Robin James]

Dave, thank you for your information.  What I've been trying to better-understand is how the client works to request the document. That's the piece that has been missing so that I can better explain it to my non-technical clients.  I'll research it some more. This line in Wikepedia is what left me hanging wanting to understand more, "The RSS reader checks the user's subscribed feeds regularly for new work, downloads any updates that it finds, and provides a user interface to monitor and read the feeds."

I hope other ColdFusion developers can learn from this post.  I have used the ColdFusion forum back when it was Allaire (and then Macromedia and now Adobe).  I tend to go there first to search for answers to my questions because there are so many outstanding developers out there that are so willing and patient with those of us still learning after all of these years.

Dave, my very first introduction with ColdFusion was in a Fig Leaf Software training class at EPA about 12 years ago.  Great company!  Thank you for helping.

And, uh, like yeah, Adam, I did google it first. 

[Adam Cameron.]

The client software stores the user's list of "subscriptions" (which is an unnecessarily glamorous way of saying "URLs"), and periodically re-requests them. That is •literally• all there is to it. An RSS reader is basically a type of web browser (that deals with the RSS file format rather than the HTML file format), which also has functionality to periodically re-fetch the documents from the "subscribed" URLs.

An RSS file is simply an XML file which contains a catalogue of entries, which the RSS app displays. All the stuff like remembering which articles have already been read, and that sort of thing is a function of the RSS app, not the RSS feed. If you download an RSS file (ie: browse to it & save it), you'll see it lists all the articles the author of the feed has chosen to, and there is nothing special to indicate that you'll already read an article or anything like that.

A lot of people - myself included - on first look think RSS feeds are somehow "clever" and the idea of subscription to a feed indicates that the source of the feed somehow "knows" about your subscription and customises the feed for you: what you've read already etc. Not so.

I think perhaps you are thinking there's a bit of the puzzle you're missing, but you're probably not...

--

Adam

[Dave Watts]

All that functionality is up to the client. The server has nothing to do with it. The client has to keep track of what feeds you've read, how often to check for new feeds, etc. In fact, this can be a problem for the RSS feed developer - some clients check too frequently, causing the server to have to work harder than it should - so you want to take advantage of HTTP caching, server-side caching, etc when building RSS feeds.

And, you're welcome of course!

Dave Watts, CTO, Fig Leaf Software

http://www.figleaf.com/

http://training.figleaf.com/

Fig Leaf Software is a Veteran-Owned Small Business (VOSB) on

GSA Schedule, and provides the highest caliber vendor-authorized

instruction at our training centers, online, or onsite.

Read this before you post:

http://forums.adobe.com/thread/607238

[Robin James]

THANKS to both of you!