I have made a change in my RSS feed. Several months back I thought I would experiment with FeedBurner Item Stats. To get this feature to work, you turn on the Feed item link clicks (”clickthrough” tracking) feature.

This allows publishers to track clickthroughs from their RSS feed. This is accomplished by redirect-links added by FeedBurner. My permalink was replaced with a redirect that increments a counter and then redirects the user back to my site.

Cool.

However, I recently noticed that some links to my posts were linking through the FeedBurner link and not directly to my own permalink. This greatly skews the per-item stats, because I cannot tell the difference between actual RSS click-throughs and other links. While this makes the stats less useful, a bigger problem is it seems to disable automatic trackbacking.

So, I turned it off. My feed is full-text anyway, so I don’t really care about clickthroughs.

If your news-reader caches posts (and therefore the item link), those redirected links will now link to my nicely-formatted FeedBurner RSS page. Not so perfect, but good enough.