Comments on: 100+ RSS Subscribers! Or How to Count Them

By: Panki

Panki — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 20:08:51 +0000

Thanks Simon for your valuable information.

By: onreact

onreact — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 20:42:07 +0000

Derek: See and be seen :-)

OK Simon, thanks anyways.

By: Simon Ward

Simon Ward — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 17:34:10 +0000

I am pretty sure that method I linked to (not that I have tried) gives you activity stats. That’s all feedburner is. It shows how many times your feed has been accessed each day. Although I suspect the analytics method may only show if it is viewed rather than accessed, so maybe it will show the value a little low. Seems like a tricky one, but I I love sharing all my personal details with google, so I just use fb.

By: Derek

Derek — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 12:36:27 +0000

So I am thinking maybe this is a good example of why publicly sharing both your knowledge and your interests can be a good idea – no?

Thanks very much for the notice and let’s connect very soon!

By: onreact

onreact — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 15:21:34 +0000

Thank you Dharmesh for your explanation. Indeed I am flattered by the fact of having such great bloggers like you in my audience!
Thank you Simon. As far as I understand this solution only counts the new subscribers though. So I won't know how many subscribed in the time span before implementing it.

By: Simon Ward

Simon Ward — Sun, 07 Oct 2007 08:52:24 +0000

You have to use a google product, but analytics might be less evil, have a look:
http://www.gospelrhys.co.uk/2007/09/how-to-track-new-rss-subscribers-google-analytics-in-3-easy-steps.html

By: Dharmesh Shah

Dharmesh Shah — Sat, 06 Oct 2007 05:09:35 +0000

Congrats on getting 100+ RSS subscribers.

I’ve met Derek Edmond (as he works in the Boston area too).

By the way, as for counting RSS subscribers (without using FeedBurner), this takes some doing. We had to develop this capability for the web analytics feature of our software and ended up being non-trivial.

It basically comes down to coming up with how many “unique” visitors are hitting your RSS feed URL within a given time period. A unique visitor is usually based on things like the IP address and user agent.