Hacking Tumblr - Add FeedBurner Stats to your Tumblelog

Want to track your RSS reader statistics for your Tumblr account? It’s actually really easy. You just need to know a little html.

To make this super easy, adding custom RSS providers and stat analytics to your tumblr account should be incorporated into our “settings” management section of our Tumblr accounts. I already requested this, but since that’s not available yet - let’s DIY it.

1. All Tumblr accounts publish their RSS feeds to http://[your tumblr account here]/rss
   
   So, for example, if your tumblr account was http://foo.tumblr.com you could then find your RSS source here http://foo.tumblr.com/rss
   
   You need this URI (aka the full http://etc text link we just talked about) information when creating your FeedBurner account.
   
   
2. Next, go get a FeedBurner account. Don’t know what feedburner is? You can read our feature FeedBurner interview over at Juxtaviews to learn more. But basically, it’s a free service that provide stats on who’s reading your tumblelog via RSS and even provides page view stats as well. So you kill two birds with one stone! After you create your account and add your feed, make sure to copy your need feedburner RSS URI. You’ll need it because we still need to add it into your Tumblr template.
   
   
3. Ok, so you created your Feedburner account to track your RSS feed from Tumblr. But now you want to have FeedBurner also track your page views and general web usage statistics, right? You do this very easily by activating “Site Stats” in yor FeedBurner account, which you’ll see on the left hand side navigation. Walk-thru the process and copy the resulting html script code. You’ll need that in a moment as well.
   
   
4. Alright, so we now have a FeedBurner URI for our RSS feed and some html for tracking website usage. Now it’s time to go back to your Tumblr account and click on “Change Settings.”
   
   
5. Scroll down to the Theme section. If you are using one of the Tumblr default themes you will need to switch to “Custom” which is located alll the way to the right. Don’t worry, by clicking the “Custom” radio button it will copy the theme you are already using - which is great because you keep the same layout but we can now easily customize the layout and add cool things like this FeedBurner code.
   
   
6. Now, you’ve already selected “Custom” theme, so it’s time to add your new FeedBurner code. Tip: When I edit the HTML for my custom theme I copy the HTML from the Tumblr editor and edit it in an external program (ie Textpad or Notepad). This just gives me more room to work with but you just as easy edit the HTML right in on the page using the Tumblr theme editor they provide.
   
   
7. First, search for title=”RSS” … this will bring you to a tag and this is the tag you need to update with your FeedBurner RSS URI. You’ll notice there is a href=”/rss” attribute on that tag. You need to replace href=”/rss” with href=”YOUR FEEDBURNER URI HERE” so for juxtanews my link attribute is href=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/Juxtanews”
   
   
8. Ok, almost done. You’ve updated your RSS feed location. Now let’s add stats tracking. Remember that html code you received after you activated “Site Stats”? You’ll need that code now.
   
   
9. This one is simple. Just scroll down to the bottom of the theme’s html and right before the closing BODY tag, paste in the FeedBurner html text. Yup, paste the entire thing - it’s not much.
   
   
10. Now scroll down to the bottom of the “settings” page and click “Save Settings” and you’re done! Now you can track your RSS readers and who’s visting your site, how many times, what pages are they reading, what outbound links are they clicking on, etc, etc. Enjoy!