Hi, as a passionate blogger and Mint enthusiast I always was interested in ways of integration between Mint and WordPress. Besides MintPopularPosts I have used Jared Bangs’ WordPress plugin MintBirdFeeder in order to track my feed usage without modifying the wordpress core files.
When I stumbled upon unlikely figures about my feed usage in the Mint reports I decided to do some investigation. It turned out that Jareds plugin could use some refinement.
WordPress serves three types of feeds: Articles (e.g. Blogurl/feed/), Latest Comments (e.g. Blogurl/comments/feed/) and Comments for particular articles (e.g. Blogurl/Article/feed/).
The MintBirdFeeder plugin does not support the second type (this is documented) and it reports the third type as of the first type. Since many people are subscribed just to the comments of my post about another WordPress plugin I wrote - in order to stay informed of recent changes - I found that these subscribers where actually reported as subscribers of the Articles feed. What a pity: I have in fact just 1/3 of the article subscribers I ought to have.
I couldn’t catch up with Jared by mail. So I wrote a replacement plugin: BirdFeederWP. It does support the two types of comment feeds mentioned above and reports them apart from the subscribers of the main articles feed.
As with Jareds plugin Mint and the Mint plugin BirdFeeder must be installed before you activate BirdFeederWP from the WordPress plugin panel. No further action should be necessary.
The plugin is - of course - free and can be found here: http://turmsegler.net/20070624/wp-plugin-birdfeederwp
It has been tested with WP 2.1, 2.2 and 2.2.1. Any user feedback would be highly welcome.
regards and Happy Minting! Benjamin
