Also, is this still the right way to do it?

Just thought of a way to get an exact number of active subscribers (or even a cumulative total)… but it requires using your site’s raw logs.

A normal feed URL might look something like this:

http://yoursite.com/podcasts/feed.xml

Instead you could generate a random identifier each time the page loads and make the URL look like this:

http://yoursite.com/podcasts/{RandomString}.xml

This would ensure every user get their own feed URL.

You drop a php file called podcasts (no file extension) in the root directory and use it to build your xml page. You would use Apache’s .htaccess file to force the phantom /podcasts/ directory in the feed URLs to be processed and treated as a php file of the same name. Apache would then disregard the random_string.xml part and just send the request to the ‘podcast’ php file for processing.

So now in your site’s raw logs you’d see a bunch of different URLs in the format:

http://yoursite.com/podcasts/UNIQUE_ID.xml

The number of unique URL’s is equal to your number of subscribers… well, the number of active subscribers for that time period.

As for the number of subscribers who are subscribed to your old feed URL, you could use the stats from your new style URLs to get a very good approximation of the number of subscribers subscribed to the old URL.

Just take the total number of hits to all of the unique URLs and divide by the number of unique URL’s (unique subscribers). This gives an average # of hits per user for your new-style URLs. Then take your total # of hits to your old generic URL and divide it by the # of hits per user from the new style and you’ll have a good idea of the number of active subscribers to your old URL.

Tim

does this work with the browser’s feed button, too? If not, it might just only track half of the subscriptions…

I think it might be pageTracker._trackPageview(); because at least I don’t see any javascript errors. But I have yet to see anything come through in the reports.

One question, however: I’m also using FeedBurner’s FeedFlare tool to create e-mail/Facebook/Digg/etc. links below each of my posts. The code for that appears to call a script that’s hosted on FeedBurner’s site, which (as far as I can tell) makes it impossible for me to add the onClick argument to the link.

I looked through the relevant groups to see if there’s something already out there on this, but found nothing. If you have any thoughts or ideas, I’d appreciate hearing them. Cheers.

I have one more uncertainty. In my feed burner Live hits section; there are these user agents’ lists I can find something new there. Google feed fetcher, I guess it’s something which crawls over the content in my blog…Could you please explain what that is!!! And is that something harmful???? Also there is something called Technorati search Bot and Feed burner Feed Insurance. Are these spiders???Or subscribers visit???Or something else!!! I found this recently…Kindly explain this it would help me a lot. I’m lacking in knowledge..

If possible, please provide the URL and I will check it out and tell you what you need to fix.

Looks like a great idea….I wanna track my subscribers. I really didn’t get a picture of how and where to place the Javascript,Kinda confused about how to do it.I tried something and it’s not working…Could you please help me out with that???