GET the number of subscribers to any RSS/Atom feed?

Question

Hi,

Any simple code snipped to GET the number of subscribers to any feed URL?

Thanks!

Answer 1

When you are using services like Feedburner, you can easily see the number of subscribers. If you are simply hosting the RSS feed yourself it will be pretty hard to find out returning visitors - you would need to include some kind of token identifying each user and match it to your server records.

I'd say you should use something like Feedburner and you are good to go.

Answer 2

First off, I'll start by saying there is no easy way to do this. You, however, do have several options.

Option 1: Use feedburner. These statistics are not 100% correct, but its by far the least painful method, but you can only use it for future and not backwards to see how many people are already subscribed.

Option 2: Use Google Webmaster to calculate the number of subscribers.

Option 3: I found this perl script on rsslib.com that parses your server logs to figure out the number of subscribers