I have been trying to find an easy solution to this problem. One that would allow me to ‘cherry-pick’ stories and add them to a custom feed. A few weeks ago, I searched again and found a solution that I think works really well and is easy to implement.

It comes from the good folks at IceRocket in the form of a free service they call RSS Builder.

If you look in the sidebar on the right, you will see an RSS feed called “Custom Video Feed”. I’ve set it up as an example for this particular post. If you hover over each item in that list, you will notice that they come from different sites. Two are from YouTube and one is from Ted.com.

Sweet …a custom feed!  So .. how to do it? Just follow these steps. It’s really easy!

Build a Channel

1. Surf to http://www.icerocket.com/
2. Click on RSS Builder
3. Click on Register Now (This service is absolutely free of charge.)
4. Once you have completed the registration process, go back to that page and log in.
5. Click on Add Channel
6. Give the Channel a name – Like “Videos”
7. Give the Channel a link – Your Blog/WebSite URL goes here.
8. Give the Channel a Description – Like “Great Videos From Around The Web”
9. Set the “Minutes Until Channel Refresh” to 10 (more on this at the end of this article)
10. Ignore the rest for now and click “Save Configuration For Channel”

You will get a “Channel Was Added Successfully” message and then you will be sent to a page called “Channels You Have”

Add Entries To Your Channel

1. Click Add Entry – (I will use a Youtube video as an example.)
2. Entry Title – (Copy paste the title of the video ) – William Kamkwamba – Building a Windmill
3. Entry Link – (copy paste the link.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-wzpqE6HHo&feature=player_embedded
4. Entry Summary – (Either Write a short summary or copy paste the summary from youtube)  When he was just 14 years old, Malawian inventor William Kamkwamba built his family an electricity-generating windmill from spare parts, working from rough plans he found in a library book.
5. Ignore the other fields for now and click “Save Item”

There you go. Item 1 is entered. Enter as many as you like!

Publish Your Channel

Now – go back to your channel listings by clicking the “My RSS Channels” towards the top right of the page.

Here is a screen shot of what that screen looks like.

Click on Publish on the appropriate channel listing . This will bring up a screen with a bunch of different options. As this article is specific to WordPress, I’ll explain what you need to do next.

The first screen looks like this.

Just copy this part: http://rss.icerocket.com/xmlfeed?id=437360

Now all you need to do is go to your widgets, drag the RSS widget wherever you want to show your new custom feed. In the field that says “Enter the RSS feed URL here:”, enter the link you copied ( http://rss.icerocket.com/xmlfeed?id=437360 ) and set the widgets other settings to your liking. If you don’t give it a title, it will use the title you gave your channel.

I prefer to use the “Better RSS Widget by grandslambert“.  I do so because it has a few extra options including having the links in the RSS feed open in a new window which in my opinion is a must!

Now all you have to do is add items to it and they will magically appear at your site. That said, the default RSS refresh in WordPress is set to 12 hours so you will have to wait for 12 hours to see it appear.

Unless you do this

Change the WP RSS Widget Refresh Rate:

I found the solution to this at Joe Casabona’s blog Casabona.org. Read the post titled:  QT: Increase the WordPress RSS Widget Refresh Rate

All you need to do is add a line of code to your theme’s functions.php file. It’s pretty easy!

So there you have it! Your own custom RSS feed. I hope you have found this useful. I am sure that this is not the only way to this. If you have seen other ways, please share them with us .. we’re all ears!

Photo Credits

RSS Icon – Aaron Ovadia

A few years ago, I started blogging. Almost immediately, I signed up for a Google Analytics account. I soon discovered that there was an enormous disconnect between what Google Analytics reported vs. my server stats. The reason for this disconnect can be explained by differences in the way they measure traffic.

WordPress, Google Analytics (and others like Quantcast & ShareThis) all capture data through the execution of a script, or page tag or some similar mechanism that runs whenever a visitor loads a page at your blog or website. The problem with this is that an increasing number of users now have script and java blocking enabled on their desktop-based browsers. They also block cookies. Many mobile devices are not captured by these mechanisms for the same reasons. Consider this as well. Most government offices and medium to large sized businesses block cookies and java script by default. Whether people at work should be surfing to your site is an entirely different issue. The reality is; they do!

The server side stats on the other hand capture everything. They miss nothing (well actually they can miss the ‘odd’ thing due to caching).  The problem with the sever stats however is that they report every search engine, spider and bot that hits your site.

What does this disconnect look like?

Here is a snapshot of the Life As A Human traffic for April 22^nd as captured by WordPress Stats and by our sever stats.

Look at the enormous difference in page-views. Our Google Analytics stats reported similar numbers of page-views as WordPress did. The lion’s share of the difference between the two is due to spiders, bots and also the way that pages are loaded within the WordPress framework. Reality is much closer to what Google and WordPress reports. By the way, Life As A Human  had 184,951 hits that day! Ahhh .. for the good old days!

So how close are WordPress and Google to reality?

I have been experimenting with the use of StumbleUpon Advertising to drive some traffic to the site. I started using StumbleUpon for advertising at synaptici.com many months before we launched Life As A Human. In short, it costs 5 cents per referral to your website or blog. So, for $5.00 you can buy 100 page-views and target a specific demographic/geographic. It’s a great service and companies like Warner Brothers, The Huffington Post and NBC, use it, with much deeper pockets than ours!

I noticed when I started to do this that when the campaign was done, StumbleUpon would report having sent 100 referrals. My WordPress stats however showed only 90 or 95. As mentioned earlier, this is due to users using script blocking. I wasn’t really that worried about a 5 or 10% discrepancy. Recently however, I noticed this delta was growing. I decided it was time to run a simple test to see if I could measure the difference.

The Test

This is a very simple test that any one can run from their blog or website.

• I created a hidden page. I called mine ‘hidden test page’. Pretty original eh!
• I set it to: no index / no follow – so that search engines, spiders and bots could not see it and affect the test results.
• I e-mailed 50 people and asked them to participate in the test by surfing to the page (once) and letting me know via e-mail when they had. I also asked them to let me know if they had surfed to the page on a desktop or a mobile (or both) so I could capture the difference between the 2. Alas, this part of my test failed as I forgot to ensure I was capturing that data on the server side. Dang! However, this did not affect the main results.
• I let the test run for 5 days then took the page off line.

Here are the results

That’s a pretty significant delta, don’t you think? The server data contains no spiders or bots. It lines up ‘exactly’ with the number of e-mail replies to the test.

Ok, so what does that mean to me?

• If you have no intention of monetizing your site, other than the morale boost of realizing that you are getting more page-views than you thought, probably not much. According to this test, if you take your WordPress reported page-views and add 33.33% to them, you will have a more accurate total.




• If you are a small to medium size publisher (website or blog) and you are monetizing through ad placement mechanisms, then, at least according to this test, you ‘might’ be leaving 33.33% of your impression ad revenue on the table. I don’t believe there is much you can do about that but knowledge is always empowering. Certainly, the advertiser won’t be in a hurry to see this change. They‘re getting more bang for the buck! Why change that? If you have some ideas, please, share them in a comment.




• If you are a larger publisher with your own marketing team and you are handling your own ad placements, you probably already know about this and have taken steps to make sure you aren’t leaving that much on the table by using your own, more sophisticated analytics tools. If you haven’t, you really should.

From a bigger picture point of view, I believe what this trend shows is that in the coming years, this issue will most certainly need to be addressed. There are several solutions but none will be perfect. Please understand, I am in no way suggesting that there is something nefarious about this. This is not a conspiracy to keep dollars out of our pockets. It is simply an artifact of current traffic measuring methodologies.

Likewise, this is not a shot at Google Analytics or WordPress Stats! If you don’t have a Google Analytics account, you really should. They have done an amazing job of developing a very powerful tool that can provide you with a wealth of information about your traffic. Not using it is to deprive yourself of data that can help you grow in ways you might not have even imagined. That people and companies block cookies and scripts is not their faults.

Another  Test – Part 2 – Google Analytics

As I mentioned, this was a simple test and it is in no way conclusive. Further and much more robust testing is needed to more accurately quantify the actual delta between the traffic measuring mechanisms mentioned in this article. This is simply a snapshot. I just happen to believe it is indicative of the current realities associated with the measurement of website traffic, and I know I am not alone in this belief.

I will be running another test sometime soon. I will be looking to capture the difference between how mobile devices and desktops are captured. I suspect that we will see a much higher percentage of missed mobile devices. This test will compare Google Analytics data against the server and WordPress stats. Actually, I did include Google Analytics in the first test but the test data yielded +/- 12% inaccuracies so I am not comfortable presenting that data. What I can tell you is that like WordPress, the Google Analytics results were significantly below the actual total.

• A huge thank you to everyone who participated in this test. I hope that you have found the results interesting and more importantly, useful. I also hope you will participate in the second test!




• If you would like to be a part of the test group for the next test, please leave a comment indicating that you would like to participate.




• If you have run these types of tests yourself, please, share your knowledge and let us know.

Photo Credits

Thumbnail – Digitage Web 2.0 – Creative Commons – Maureen Flynn-Burhoe

© Gil Namur, 2010