forum2rss
From:
James Robertson
Date:
2005 Oct 02 11:00 UTC
Short link
Dan says:
"I don't know how we could measure how many people are using RSS on Brighton &
Hove or any GroupServer group."
This is a problem. It's important to apply metrics when measuring success.
I'm sure the UK government will measure the success of e-Democracy by the
increase of voters on Polling day. However it helps to be able to see where the
achievements have been made and how.
It doesn't require a lot of work, periodic sampling would be sufficient.
I suggest that each member is given a unique identifier e.g. 157574, when the
user initially wishes to subscribe to an RSS feed they click on the hyperlink.
This hyperlink will contain the unique identifier e.g.
http://groupserver.org/groups/demo/messages/view_thread_rss?id=157574
Whenever the user's RSS reader requests the latest RSS feed from the web server
it contains the user's id. The web server will then be set to log all RSS feed
requests, probably in a daily log file. The GroupServer administrator would
run a script, possibly on a monthly basis which reads the Web server log file
containing the RSS feed requests for the previous month. The script would then
parse the id's for a particular URL, to identify who is using RSS feeds and
how often. The results could then be stored in a spreadsheet, which would then
generate statistics eg. a bar graph to show the no of RSS feed requests per
user, per month.
This feature does add value to the system, and it would help indicate how
GroupServer forums were being used. If you knew ie. the GroupServer site had
been gaining a lot more hits over the past 1 month you would be in a better
position to find out why and how it could be solved.
Best wishes,
Jim Robertson