---
title: "Identifying RSS readers, and obsessively watching referrers in RSS"
date: 2002-06-11T05:34:03-04:00
url: https://blog.lmorchard.com/2002/06/11/oooaio/
author: Les Orchard
---

# Identifying RSS readers, and obsessively watching referrers in RSS

<p>Okay, starting to poke at my referrer scripts again and produced two new things:  <a href="http://www.decafbad.com/recent_referers_rss.php">Recent Referrers in <a href="http://www.decafbad.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/RSS">RSS</a></a> (<a href="http://www.decafbad.com/recent_referers_rss_php.txt">src</a>) and <a href="http://www.decafbad.com/rss_readers.phtml">RSS Feed Readers</a> (<a href="http://www.decafbad.com/rss_readers_phtml.txt">src</a>).  I simplified my database a bit, collapsing multiple rows into single rows with a hit count column.  Also squashed a few stupid bugs that had cropped up in the Great Site Move a month or so ago.  Realized that the counts were insanely wrong, sometimes showing a count as high as 15 for a post that might have only 3 back links.</p>
<p>Likely the referers in <a href="http://www.decafbad.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/RSS">RSS</a> will be of interest only to me as I obsessively watch my site (though I <i>do</i> subscribe to <a href="http://www.disenchanted.com/dis/xml.html">Disenchanted's Recent Inbound</a>, since it gives me a stream of new sites to visit).  But, the <a href="http://www.decafbad.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/RSS">RSS</a> feed readers list is a few steps closer to the friends-of list I want to move from <a href="http://www.decafbad.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/LiveJournal">LiveJournal</a> out into the blogosphere proper.  </p>
<p>One of the next things I want to do is start cobbling a fairly modular &amp; general URL investigator - that is, give it a url, and have it try to track down title, author, contents page, <a href="http://www.decafbad.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/RSS">RSS</a> feed, location, and any other metadata that comes up.  I could then use this to flesh out all the links everywhere, from backlinks to the friends-of list.  Basically what many other people have been doing for different semantic aspects, but all rolled into one agent.</p>
<p>Along with that, I want to implement some manual annotation of sites known by my site.  Thinking that, between per-post backlinks and <a href="http://www.decafbad.com/twiki/bin/view/Main/RSS">RSS</a> reader links, I could eventually build a decent database of metadata here.  With that, all kinds of nifty things could happen...</p>
<p>Okay, time for bed.  Starting to ramble, or at least be tempted to do so.</p>
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shortname=oooaio

<div id="comments" class="comments archived-comments">
            <h3>Archived Comments</h3>
            
        <ul class="comments">
            
        <li class="comment" id="comment-221090289">
            <div class="meta">
                <div class="author">
                    <a class="avatar image" rel="nofollow" 
                       href="http://www.10500bc.org"><img src="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=2a158ec6895b9af4ce255febfe69ffee&amp;size=32&amp;default=http://mediacdn.disqus.com/1320279820/images/noavatar32.png"/></a>
                    <a class="avatar name" rel="nofollow" 
                       href="http://www.10500bc.org">Josh Cooper</a>
                </div>
                <a href="#comment-221090289" class="permalink"><time datetime="2002-06-11T12:50:12">2002-06-11T12:50:12</time></a>
            </div>
            <div class="content">Nice scripts, combine that with Bills RSS comments script and you never have to visit your own site again :)</div>
            
        </li>
    
        <li class="comment" id="comment-221090290">
            <div class="meta">
                <div class="author">
                    <a class="avatar image" rel="nofollow" 
                       href="http://www.decafbad.com"><img src="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=2ac2cffd36ada8c734b90e02a1e5c1ac&amp;size=32&amp;default=http://mediacdn.disqus.com/1320279820/images/noavatar32.png"/></a>
                    <a class="avatar name" rel="nofollow" 
                       href="http://www.decafbad.com">l.m.orchard</a>
                </div>
                <a href="#comment-221090290" class="permalink"><time datetime="2002-06-11T13:31:04">2002-06-11T13:31:04</time></a>
            </div>
            <div class="content">Yay, I forgot about that.  All done:

http://www.decafbad.com/recent_comments_rss.xml</div>
            
        </li>
    
        <li class="comment" id="comment-221090291">
            <div class="meta">
                <div class="author">
                    <a class="avatar image" rel="nofollow" 
                       href=""><img src="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=b53911af792174097e8acb282414b44c&amp;size=32&amp;default=http://mediacdn.disqus.com/1320279820/images/noavatar32.png"/></a>
                    <a class="avatar name" rel="nofollow" 
                       href="">Bill Kearney</a>
                </div>
                <a href="#comment-221090291" class="permalink"><time datetime="2002-06-12T13:53:39">2002-06-12T13:53:39</time></a>
            </div>
            <div class="content">Heh, it's really amazing to see how a series of really simple scripts and templates leads to all sorts of unexpected associations.  The aggregator is indeed becoming much of what exists in Digital Dashboard sort of implementations.</div>
            
        </li>
    
        </ul>
    
        </div>
