My AggBug Experiment

Published 13 October 04 09:58 AM | Scott Mitchell

This blog is powered by Scott Watermasysk's .Text blogging engine, but it's an older version of the software, one that doesn't support statistics. More recent versions of .Text provide a rough estimate as to how many folks have read your blog through the use of AggBugs. Prior to the popularization of syndicated content, determining how many folks read your content was a rather simple task of parsing the Web server's log files. But with syndicated content, examining the number of people who requested the RSS feed does not give a strong estimate. For example, my aggregator might slurp down a particular RSS feed 24 times over the course of the day, yet I may read a particular entry only once or twice, or maybe not at all.

To surmount these problems, AggBugs are commonly used. An AggBug is a tiny bit of HTML in the RSS feed that typically is an <img> tag that requests a 1x1 transparent GIF file. Each time someone loads up a particular entry in their aggregator (or visits the particular blog entry page), a request is made to that GIF file. To determine how many times your blog has been read, you can simply lookup in your Web server's log files to see how many times that GIF has been requested.

Since the version of .Text I use lacks the AggBug feature, I have never really had a good idea as to how many folks read my blog entries. The suspense has been killing me, so I decided to implement by own AggBug feature for a particular blog entry, Sample Chapter of my .NET Web Services DVD. (Rather than using just a simple 1x1 GIF, I created an ASP.NET page that returned a 1x1 GIF, but logged more information than just a simple hit (namely the user's IP, their User-Agent string, and so on.) It's now been 24 hours since that blog entry was posted, and here are the results:

553 unique IP addresses requests
860 total requests
Twice as many people (2) hit my site with Netscape 3 than did with IE 4 (1). Only 2 folks visited with Opera, which is as many people as visited with Safari.
The vast majority (95+%) use IE 6.0 (I believe the popular blog readers - RssBandit, FeedReader, FeedDemon, etc. - use IE as their browser by default, so this makes sense).

It'll be interesting to see how the readership for a particular blog entry shrinks or grows as the days progress. I'd wager something like 80% of the views occur in the first week (maybe two), and the remaining 20% occur over the rest of the year.