jekyll/jekyll-feed

Append information to post URL (e.g. UTM source)

SeanKilleen opened this issue · 4 comments

I'm willing to contribute this feature but wanted to write it up first.

Use case: I'm using Fathom Analytics on my blog. I think a lot of my traffic is being driven from RSS readers, but it's hard to tell because they show up as direct traffic.

I'd really like the ability to append something like ?utm_source=RSS to the URLs in the feed so that they'll correctly show up in my analytics.

I think this would entail:

  • Configuration for hard-coded text to append (presumably we'd include the ? and strip it off if a user adds it)
  • Updating the XML template to include the string if set, and otherwise include nothing
  • Appropriate tests
  • Docs update

It seems like a straightforward addition but before embarking I wanted to ensure this project was still up for receiving contributions and that this one is a fit.

@parkr are you interested in this? If so, I'll get on it; otherwise I'll close it out.

Assuming there's no interest since I haven't seen a comment in 4+ months. Closing this out.

Hey Sean, I suspect many users would like the option to gain insights into traffic from their feeds. I think we should consider this holistically, for example what about some template variables? Would it make sense to create a template which can be configured at the post level as well as the site level, or only the site level? Also, how should this be enabled and disabled? What would you propose for empty inputs (either null or "")? Do we transpose them to "none", remove them, or leave them as-is?

@parkr happy to dive into this but first wanted to confirm your interest. Will reopen and write up some thoughts.