A WordPress plugin for the Mint Bird Feeder Pepper (mint-bird-feeder)
Friday 29th January 2010If you use Shaun Inman’s Mint stat tracking software on a WordPress based site, as I do on Forge Code, you probably use the Bird Feeder Pepper. This ‘Pepper’ – the name given to Mint plugins/widgets – tracks the number of hits on your RSS feeds. The normal way to get Bird Feeder to collect this data is to manually modify the content of the PHP template file(s) in WordPress that are used to generate the content of your RSS feeds.
Modifying core WordPress files is fraught with issues – primarily the fact that whenever you upgrade WordPress itself, there’s a good chance that any changes you’ve made will get nuked. Writing a WordPress plugin is a much more robust way to achieve the same thing, which avoids all of the issues with modifying the WordPress core. I have written a very simple plugin for WordPress that allows the Mint Bird Feeder Pepper to gather stats from your RSS, RSS2 or Atom feeds without any configuration – just install the plugin, and activate it. It only handles “post feeds” (not “comment feeds”), but if that’s all you’re interested in, this plugin should come in handy.
Here’s a link to the WordPress Plugin Directory page for the plugin.
Monday 15th February 2010 at 7:51 am
Might I suggest adding on the blog name to the name of the RSS feed, just in case the user has more than one blog they are using on the same Mint insitallation?
$bloginfo = get_bloginfo(‘name’); define(‘BIRDFEED’, “$bloginfo Posts (RSS)”);
Monday 15th February 2010 at 7:51 pm
Good suggestion, Danny. I’m more than open to modifying/improving the plugin to be useful for more people, but I don’t want to spend the time required to test features that aren’t utilised on my own site.
Do you have multiple blogs on the one Mint installation? If so, would you be willing to test it? Send me an email.