DISQUS

Zee. · 1 year ago

Like the redesign - that last site was clunky! Checking out the FF extension again now too...

DGentry · 1 year ago

The trouble I have with aideRSS is its wild inaccuracy. It is trying to screen-scrape sites to figure out how many comments a post has, and it is frequently wrong. They also stop checking for new delicious.com and Google shares almost immediately after the post goes up; I know in one case it stopped checking within an hour. If your readers trickle in over the course of a day or two, AideRSS will miss all of that interaction.

The new site design for AideRSS has rectified a couple of its earlier shortcomings: the count of tweets for a post was always zero before, now it works but appears subject to some inaccuracy. Posts are also retained for a longer time: they used to expire quickly, so a blog which does not update frequently would show only the five most recent entries.

I suppose AideRSS works well enough for sites like techcrunch (and louisgray.com) with a large volume of material and a userbase which descends on new posts immediately after they go up. AideRSS works far less well for smaller sites. It is hard enough establishing a blog without services like AideRSS magnifying ones shortcomings.

xavierv · 1 year ago

I love how clicking on a tag highlights all the items withholding that same tag.

With an AJAX interface, there must be nice stuff to do there.

Melanie Baker · 1 year ago

Hi Louis, thanks for the write-up! As you noted, a lot of what we rolled out is user request-driven, so we're pretty excited about it (and are soaking up the feedback, both positive and constructive).

A good chunk of our user base consists of those using the functionality for business purposes as well -- blogging strategy, brand management, etc. -- so we definitely wanted to deliver features to enhance and streamline those processes.

One other request we got was for targeted tutorials -- PostRank for social media management, for example. We thought that was a great idea and will be working on those (and certainly welcome suggested topics).

@DGentry If you see off comment counts, please let us know. It does happen from time to time, and obviously we want to make sure any glitches get fixed.

Re. Delicious, yeah, some things stopped working after their site update. That's been fixed now, and you can see those metrics if you mouse over PostRank score icons.

Your comments about tweets and posts expiring aren't something I've seen much. If you can send specific URLs where you've seen that activity, we'll certainly look into it.

I'm curious as to how you don't see the functionality working for lower traffic/post volume sites. Feed-based PostRank only compares a site's content to its own past performance, so the rankings wouldn't be skewed by analysis against louisgray.com, for example. Analysis doesn't go on indefinitely, but we've determined that regardless of the site or traffic volume, the "response curve" for reader engagement is pretty much the same. Or were you referring to something else?

DGentry · 1 year ago

I debated whether to post this publicly. Since I started it in public, I've decided to continue it in public.

The main reason I think PostRank is not helpful to small blogs is that in order to save on bandwidth costs the PostRank metrics are collected for just a short time, and then infrequently thereafter. If you don't have a mass of readers who descend on a new article to comment, share, and save it almost immediately, the PostRank will remain very low until AideRSS gets around to polling it again. I'll have an article get comments through the course of its first day, but AideRSS shows 0 comments until some number of days later.
Its a truism with RSS: people will either read an article when it first appears in their reader, or not at all. AideRSS consistently assigns my articles a minimal PostRank for the first several days, so anyone using PostRank in their reader is more likely to skip everything I write.
I emailed AideRSS about this, and received an acknowledgement that rate limiting is done (and thats it). AideRSS needs a ping service, not just for RSS updates but to have the bot go re-check the metrics.

A secondary problem is that the PostRank metrics, most notably comment counts, suffer occasional (and large) errors. Larger blogs with larger metrics suffer little from the noise. For a smaller blog the noise will exceed the signal: articles achieve high PostRank based not on any quality of the article, but solely on measurement inaccuracy.

For my blog, a normal article gets 0-1 comments while a popular article will get 3-4 comments. The counts tracked by AideRSS are frequently off by more than this. One older article of mine shows 102 comments. This sets the PostRank bar awfully high for subsequent posts.
I asked about it on the AideRSS uservoice site: the comment count problem was acknowledged but nothing was done about correcting my site nor was any other solution offered.
Much later, I noticed that some of the uservoice answers mentioned changes in the blog template which could improve the bot's accuracy. Unfortunately I couldn't find the template changes mentioned, and I'm sorry to say by that point I'd given up on AideRSS and didn't bother to follow up.


I was enthused about AideRSS when I first saw Louis Gray's article about it. I would zealously check your site every time I posted an article... and was consistently disappointed. I always tweet, save to delicious, and Google Reader share every article I post. Those counts should have always been at least 1, but AideRSS consistently showed them as zero and assigned a PostRank of 1.0. Days later, the PostRank would go to somewhere between 3.0 and 6.0 (never higher, because of that one wildly inflated post being 10.0).

According to feedburner that one wildly inflated article has the most fetches of anything I've written. PostRank does have an impact. However that one inflated article isn't the article I would want to nudge new readers towards. Unfortunately I don't get to make that choice. PostRank does.

Melanie Baker · 1 year ago

My response is quite long, so I've posted it as a blog post instead so as not to hijack the blog, and to make the responses accessible to others who might have the same issues or questions.

http://blog.postrank.com/2008/11/17/troubleshoo...