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I provide an RSS feed for my blog. From my access.log, I see that there is a decent number of subscribers to my feed. Here is the data I could pull from it:
by susam 6y ago
I provide an RSS feed for my blog. From my access.log, I see that there is a decent number of subscribers to my feed. Here is the data I could pull from it:
Feedly 91 subscribers
Inoreader 16 subscribers
Feedbin 6 subscribers
NewsBlur 4 subscribers
The Old Reader 3 subscribers
BazQux 2 subscribers
WordPress 2 subscribers
-------------------------------
Total 124 subscribers
I get about 4000-6000 hits to my website on a normal day. It increases by 5 to 10 times if a post hits the HN front page. When I publish new post, I see from the HTTP referer information in the logs that about 30 or so hits come from users who find a link to my post in their feed reader. These are very small numbers but they are good enough to keep the feed alive.
- woodruffw 6y agoI came here to say exactly this: my numbers are similar to yours (and from headers only, like you[1]), and a decent proportion of my views come from feed clients. My blog generator takes care of the feed for me; I haven't thought about managing it in years. [1]: https://www.yossarian.net/snippets#vbnla https://www.yossarian.net/snippets#vbnla
- COGlory 6y agoWhat is the topic of your blog?
- susam 6y agoI don't write very often but when I do it is usually tech or math. I didn't link to it here because it might look like self-promotion. In case you are interested to take a look, please see my profile for the link.
- xnx 6y agoHow do you identify Feedly subscribers? Isn't there a single request from Feedly that it uses for all of its users?
- susam 6y agoHere is what I see in my access logs: [30/Jan/2021:12:58:03 +0000] "GET /blog/rss.xml HTTP/1.1" 200 22757 "-" "Feedly/1.0 (+http://www.feedly.com/fetcher.html; 91 subscribers; like FeedFetcher-Google)" [31/Jan/2021:12:58:04 +0000] "GET /blog/rss.xml HTTP/1.1" 200 22757 "-" "Feedly/1.0 (+http://www.feedly.com/fetcher.html; 91 subscribers; like FeedFetcher-Google)" [01/Feb/2021:12:58:13 +0000] "GET /blog/rss.xml HTTP/1.1" 200 22757 "-" "Feedly/1.0 (+http://www.feedly.com/fetcher.html; 91 subscribers; like FeedFetcher-Google)" [02/Feb/2021:12:58:19 +0000] "GET /blog/rss.xml HTTP/1.1" 200 22757 "-" "Feedly/1.0 (+http://www.feedly.com/fetcher.html; 91 subscribers; like FeedFetcher-Google)" [03/Feb/2021:12:58:30 +0000] "GET /blog/rss.xml HTTP/1.1" 200 22757 "-" "Feedly/1.0 (+http://www.feedly.com/fetcher.html; 91 subscribers; like FeedFetcher-Google)"
- justusthane 6y agoSo feedly tells you how many subscribers they have when they hit your feed. That's neat of them.
- jlelse 6y agoNot only Feedly does this. Most of those feed readers do it.
- avian 6y agoIn fact, Feedly was the only large centralized feed reader that didn't do subscriber count reporting via UA string for the longest time. They made you do a GET request on some API endpoint if you wanted to get your subscriber count. They implemented it some time back, but it's still kind of buggy - at least for my blog. Two or three different IPs periodically do a GET on my feed URL with the Feedly UA and they all report different subscriber counts.
- ryukafalz 6y agoSomething I'd be curious about: how many of the hits on a new post are by RSS readers before the post hits HN vs. after? I know RSS is the most reliable way for me to notice a new post on blogs that update infrequently, and I wonder how many HN submissions come from people seeing a new post in their feed readers.
- avian 6y agoI have about the same distribution of RSS clients on my blog as well. Feedly seems to be the largest, with about 10x reported subscribers than their competitors. Newsblur, The Old Reader and Inoreader are all about the same, but far behind. Then there's a sea of various self-hosted readers like the TinyTinyRSS and desktop programs. Note that these are all self-reported numbers from the user agent string - as far as I can tell, Feedly might be inflating their numbers to give an impression of a large user base and to appear on top of lists like this.
- D13Fd 6y agoIt is unfortunate that it's so tough to track RSS viewers. I'm always tempted to convert the feed to cut-back version just so I can see what posts are actually popular.
- dmje 6y agoFeedburner was always the way. Then Google bought it and I’m not sure what happened next
- corobo 6y agoAlmost literally nothing other than the domain changing. Don't remind them they have it, they might shut it down :P
- tn1 6y agoAn idea I had is to just embed a pixel into the item body. You can self host it too: just analyze the apache logs (or whatever you have) for requests to that pixel.