LShift Ltd.

Estimating the number of blog subscriptions

Unlike traditional website visitors, most readers of a blog use a news aggregator to periodically pull new items from the blog’s syndication feed. As a result, the co-relation between the number of requests and the number of times an item is read is broken, and to confuse things even more - many readers use a public aggregator service which saves the feed to a central repository and serves the saved entries to many readers. For such services, growth in the number of subscribers is not represented by an increase in the number of requests made.

To get a rough estimate of the number of subscribers to a feed we need to separate between requests made by public services on behalf of more than one user, and requests made by individual news aggregators.

If you too are curious about the number of subscribers to your blog (and have access to the HTTP access log of the server hosting it) you can give my little script, Blogalizer, a try.

Continue Reading 3 comments July 4th, 2006 Tom Berger

Java equality for testing

I wanted to define equality functions for unit testing purposes. The general pattern is that I’ll call a method that returns a complex data structure. I’ll want to test if the data structure matches the sample data structure in my test. Frequently the definition of Object.equals() won’t test equality in the way I wants to - it will depend on identity. I’ve defined an equality function that generally provides what I need, and can be easily specialised. There are quite a few things to consider, so I thought I’d write this article about it.

Continue Reading 1 comment July 4th, 2006 david