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Comment by jlongster | Hacker News Reader

That's a really impressive growth rate. I've started a blog and haven't quite hit that stride yet.

How do you track your RSS subscriptions? I've been wondering about that recently. I didn't want to use Feedburner since you have it give it control of everything.

I log requests for my feeds and count the unique IPs from them. This isn't quite accurate though, since it'll count one person from multiple places. I suppose a better solution is to point my RSS subscription link to a redirect page which logs the subscription request. However, I don't know you'd miss anyone who somehow subscribes from the straight link to the XML feed.

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From the looks of it, he uses FeedBurner.

It took me quite a bit of time before I got over the whole "give everything to FeedBurner thing," but once I did I never looked back. It's a pretty good service and works well almost all the time.

I've been wondering the same thing. I spent some time playing around with feedburner, but after two hours I gave up. I have absolutely no idea how many subscribers I have to my blog.

Please someone - do a startup that gets this right. It can't be that hard and there is a real problem waiting to be solved.

Yeah, I just turned everything over the Feedburner, but it's a mysterious process. It took a while to figure out the right way to do it, and I can't find much on how they collect their stats.

A nice and elegant RSS tracker with a clear explanation of how to integrate it and how it collects the stats would be nice.

Many (if not most) subscribers don't do so directly--Google Reader has huge market share and that's just a single IP. They give up the subscriber count in the User-Agent though. Add in services like MyYahoo and Bloglines and your feed can be reaching a ton of users with only a few IPs.

I just let Feedburner manage everything. That's what I started from day one. They have pretty a good service and I have nothing to complain about. But you have a valid point that they control everything.

Not to mention Google Reader being counted as only one person.

Luckily, as someone else mentioned, I noticed that they provide the number of subscribers from them in the Google Reader User-Agent.

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