Feeburner, the leading Syndication Engine for just about most of the blogs on this planet, has pulled out one small but very useful feature from its statistics. Feedburner which was acquired by Google late last year has not yet come up with an explanation as to why the All Time Stats option was removed.

But as of now, the data of the past is still preserved and there are workarounds for you to get it. But Still it isn’t nice on the part of Feedburner to remove this useful option overnight without anyone having a clue about it. If you remember when Feedburner was acquired last year, Google had made all the pro services free, saying that they would pay the bill.

Google also promised new innovations and features and said the Feedburner would continue to grow. In contrast the Feedburner blog has not been updated since November 2007. Does this mean that Feedburner is also becoming like Google’s other acquired properties that have stopped innovating after coming under the hood of Google? I hope Not.

What’s the big deal you might ask? Well a lot of Bloggers have had their feeds hosted on Feedburner for a pretty long time, and with this option removed we no longer have access to the historical data. This means we can no longer map our growth trends over a period of time, we can no longer tell our advertisers about the growth rate of our blogs, we can no longer see when our feeds reached specific milestones.

Now please Google listen to us, and get this feature back. By removing this you gain nothing other than a little bit of more of storage space, bandwidth and CPU cycles. Come on Google, you aren’t all that cheap right?

While Google remains silent on this issue, here are a few workarounds you can use to access the all time data.

Workaround #1 : URL Hack

• Login to your Feedburner Account and Note down the Feed id (XXXXXXX).
• Now to see you all time Subscriber stats visit : http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/subscribers?dateRangeName=all&id=XXXXXXX
• To see your Item Usage Visit : http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/items?dateRangeName=all&id=XXXXXXX
• To see your Uncommon uses visit : http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/uncommonuses?dateRangeName=all&id=XXXXXXX
• Replace the XXXXXXX with the Feed id that you noted down in the first step.

Workaround #2 : CSV/Excel Hack

• Login to your Feedburner account..
• On the Navigation Column you will see an export option.
• Select either Excel or CSV and download the data.
• Use your favorite spreadsheet tool to graph the data.

I suggest you download the data and keep it with you, incase Feedburner decides to remove all the historical data. What do you think of this move from Feedburner? Is Feedburner also suffering the same fate as other Google properties?

Well some of the new features that we will see in Google Analytics include : 

• Tracking of site search – ‘find out what people search for on your site and where these searches lead’
• Event Tracking capability – reports ‘designed to help you understand how people use and interact with Ajax, Flash and multimedia on your site without artificially increasing your pageview metrics.’
• Outbound Link Tracking – ‘report on links visitors clicked on your site that direct them to another site’

Well currently Site Search tracking is available to all Google Analytics user while the other two are in closed beta. Google has also released a new script that will now host the new features of Google Analytics. Google says that site owners need to update their pages’ tracking script from urchin.js to ga.js in order to use the new features that is Event Tracking and Outbound Link Tracking.

While the upgrade looks pretty good, it would be nice if Google Releases a free version of Urchin that is less powerful than the commercial version that we can install on our own webserver if we want to have simple but rich stats for our website.

Take a look at some of the features..

• CPU – Monitor cpu usage. 7 display modes, multiple core support.
• Memory – Monitor memory usage. 4 display modes, page ins/outs and swap usage display.
• Disks – Monitor disk usage and activity. 6 display modes, ability to hide disks you dont want to see.
• Network – Monitor current and total bandwidth, peak bandwidth, ip addresses . Ability to hide interfaces you dont want to see.
• Temps – Monitor the temperature of your mac. 2 display modes, ability to hide sensors you dont want to see.
• Fans – Monitor the fan speeds in your mac. 2 display modes, ability to hide sensors you dont want to see.
• Bluetooth – Control bluetooth status plus monitor the battery level of your Apple wireless keyboard or mouse.
• Date & Time – Date + time in your menubar. World clock display lets you see the time in multiple locations around the world.

Here are some screenshots of iStat Menus in action :

  

Click Here to Download iStat Menus (Freeware)