October 18, 2003
@ 08:05 PM

I've bumped up the version number for dasBlog to 1.4. I've got a couple of enhancements myself in a private build here and the folks over in the workspace at GotDotNet have added quite a few cool things as well. I want to check in my new stuff before end of next week, so that we'll have an "official build" ready just before PDC.

The two features I added today are evil spy-features "ClickThrough" and "AggBug".

ClickThrough is an automatic mechanism that will (if configured) replace all hyperlinks in your web-page content with references to a redirector service, which logs clicks. So you'll learn which links people actually click. I added this mostly because I am curious about my downloads.

AggBug (long version: "RSS Aggregator Web Bugs") injects a reference 1x1 transparent GIF into the HTML that's emitted by the RSS generator for each entry. The GIF is served by the engine itself and tracks those requests. I am doing that, because I really want to know how many readers I have. Currently I only see the readers who are coming to the web-site, but I suspect that the vast majority are using aggregators.

Update: I should probably add that I am not logging IP addresses in these two features just as I am not doing that with referrers.

Categories: dasBlog

Sunday, October 19, 2003 3:11:03 AM UTC
I'm not sure I like web bugs ending up in RSS feeds. If this becomes a trend I'll have to start filtering img tags out of RSS items or at least make it an option in RSS Bandit. :(
Monday, October 20, 2003 3:50:20 PM UTC
It really doesn't matter if you are logging IP or not. IP is already logged by IIS ;-)
Monday, October 20, 2003 4:24:20 PM UTC
Well, yes, but it's about correlation.
Clemens Vasters
Monday, October 20, 2003 11:31:41 PM UTC
I like the AggBug idea. One of the hardest things to quantify with blogs is who reads what and how often.

-Scott
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