PoducateMe: Practical Solutions for Podcasting in Education
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name the feed in FeedBurner), not the URL to the feed you uploaded to your server.
Tracking Episode Downloads Made Outside a Feed
FeedBurner’s Feed statistics provide you with a good idea of how many people are
subscribed to your podcast and which episodes are most popular. At this point,
FeedBurner collects this information for us by tracking how users interact with our feed.
But what about the listeners who don’t subscribe to our feed—the people who click the
links on our blog that lead directly to the MP3 files? Clicks on these direct links will not be
recorded by FeedBurner, so our episode download stats could be skewing somewhat
lower than where they should be.
We can fix the direct link dilemma by rewriting our links so that they are tracked by
FeedBurner. We’ll have to get our hands a little dirty with HTML code, but it’s really just a
simple cut and paste job.
1.
Visit your FeedBurner feed with a browser. In this example, we’re going to visit
2.
After the page loads, select View > View Source from Safari’s menu bar (if you’re
using a browser other than Safari, you may have to take a different route to view
the page source).
3.
Look for an enclosure tag in the code that contains the FeedBurner link to your
episode. As highlighted in red in Figure 135, the code we’re looking for will be in
the format of <div class=enclosureFilename><a
Van_Gogh.mp3">AHPY_Van_Gogh.mp3</a></div>.
Figure 135: Look for the FeedBurner link to your podcast episode in the enclosure tag.
Now, the code will not be highlighted for you as I’ve shown in Figure 135—you’ll have to
do a little bit of searching for it. Try doing a Find for your filename to help you locate the
code quickly.
