Performancing Joins The Blog Metrics Fracas

I have tried a slew of blog metrics tools, including MeasureMap (my fave), Blogflux (my former choice, which just stopped updating one day), BuddyMap, SiteMetrics, and I don't know how many others over the years. Now Performancing has entered the fray with its newly announced metrics tool.

So, I tried it, and it failed for me immediately. My blog is "http://www.stoweboyd.com/message", but it keeps resolving to "http://www.stoweboyd.com", ignoring the "message". Ok, but then I am getting no metrics, despite putting the javascript into my templates.

No one else seems to be complaining, so I will ping them.

This is just another example of how things don't fit together in the blogosphere. Here's another recent annoying example. I wanted to take the most popular post RSS feed from my Measuremap account. The RSS is secured by password, but they allow your to embed the password in the URL like this --
http://stowe.boyd%40gmail.com:password@alpha.measuremap.com/syndicate/1271/popular_posts
-- with the word password replaced with my real password. So I tried to paste that URL into the Typepad feed capability so I would be able to display the most popular posts in the margin of /Message: it barfed, without an error message. I pasted a Feedburner feed into the Typepad feed, and that worked, so I tried passing the Measuremap feed into Feedburner: their parser barfed. (They say they will tweak it to accept this form of URL, sometime in the future.) I tried to pass the Measuremap feed to Feedigest, and it did not barf! However, I was unable to get any sort of useful output from Feedigest's various options, since the Measuremap RSS doesn't look exactly like the typical blog RSS, although it is apparently well-formed.

What I would really like is for Measuremap to just give me a javascript I can plug in to display the 10 most popular posts at /Message, today. Theoretically, RSS is supposed to be really simple, isn't it? But none of these commercial companies -- these aren't kids fooling around in their garages -- can get this stuff to work consistently.

Good luck to Performancing, though, and all the others. There is clearly a long way to go before all this stabilizes and maturity shows up in the tools we are all relying on on a daily basis.

tags: measuremap, blogflux, performancing, feedburner, feedigest, blog+metrics, rss+feeds

Comments

[mark evans]

stowe,
i tried performancing and it worked without a hitch, even though i'm on one of the "other" blog platforms (blogware). i still like blogbeat better because it has a nicer look and feel. i agree with your measuremap assessment. my biggest beef with measuremap is it's not a one javascript implementation unlike blogbeat and performancing.

[kalbzayn]

Performancing only keeps track of the base url. I have two blogs off of my kalbzayn.com. They are both being tracked just fine by performancing, but they are being tracked together instead of two separate entities. Annoying a bit, but workable for me, and something that has been brought up in the forums and something they are working on:
http://performancing.com/node/1493

The stats do not update anywhere near real time. I've noticed about 1/2 hour to an hour delay between when my normal stats tracker updates and performancing updates.

And, right now they are having database overload problems that are causing all sorts of bad problems.

[Nick Wilson]

Hey Stowe, sorry to hear you had issues!

Firstly, the url thing is normal. As long as the code is on the pages you want to track, all will be well.

Unless.... we're having our first growth blip and the servers are being reconfigured ahead of schedule (we always planned for them to be when real data was streaming in, but it's been more popular than expected, sooner) in which case you will see "no metrics" untill that is done.

I hope it doesn't put you off giving it a try later (couple of hours we think for tweaks), and if you have any more questions you're welcome to email me and i'll make sure you get what you need.

Cheers