Performancing Metrics: A Solid Start

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 “/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.