Feed logging in progress ... keep hands away from moving parts

The feeds for both The Core Dump and LinkFest have been retooled so that log information streams into a MySQL database for later obsessive perusal. Hopefully there shouldn’t be any glitches… Fingers crossed, but please let me know if something’s broken all of a sudden.

The basic concept is that requests for the current feeds get redirected to a PHP page that logs the relevant information, and then redirects again to the “real” feed. Was forced to do a second redirect since simply including the feeds in the PHP page yields a nasty XML parsing error that would be a bit of a pain to work around. So bailing wire it is.

The impetus for this is that my hosting provider is somewhat lacking in log parsing tools, which is easy enough to work around with the pretty darn nice and free SiteMeter. However, I tend to look at RSS feeds (and I use the term generically to refer to any kind of feed) as different from web page visits, and would prefer to keep logging for the two outputs separated.

Looking around on the web, there’s another free service called FeedBurner which looks like it could do the job, but it forces you to redirect your feeds to their site, and I really don’t want to introduce yet another point of failure in my little empire here, so that was out.

Hence this solution, which apart from a little glitch due to somebody not paying attention when he should which led to the LinkFest overwriting the main blog, should be transparent to anybody reading the feeds.

Now it’s on to writing a nifty frontend to the harvested information.

Onward and upward.