My Feeds And Who Reads Them

Further to my thoughts about how to measure the growth of your readership, I hacked up a bit of perl which went sniffing for instances of %d reader(s) or %d subscriber(s) amongst my Apache logs, and boiled down the results.

/dropsafe/index.rss 46 readers via Feedfetcher-Google
/dropsafe/index.rss 38 readers via Bloglines/3.1
/dropsafe/index.rss 8 readers via NewsGatorOnline/2.0
/dropsafe/index.rss 2 readers via LiveJournal.com
/dropsafe/index.rss 2 readers via AlestiFeedBot/0.7
/dropsafe/index.rss 1 readers via Hatena
/dropsafe/index.rss 1 readers via Mozilla/5.0

/dropsafe?flav=rss 4 readers via Bloglines/3.1
/dropsafe?flav=rss 2 readers via NewsGatorOnline/2.0
/dropsafe?flav=rss 1 readers via Feedfetcher-Google

/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi?flav=rss 24 readers via LiveJournal.com
/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi?flav=rss 11 readers via Bloglines/3.1
/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi?flav=rss 3 readers via Feedfetcher-Google
/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi?flav=rss 2 readers via Mozilla/5.0
/cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi?flav=rss 1 readers via NewsGatorOnline/2.0

/ahm/blogs.sun.com-14d.atom 2 readers via Feedfetcher-Google
/ahm/blogs.sun.com-24h.atom 1 readers via Feedfetcher-Google
/ahm/blogs.sun.com-48h.atom 1 readers via Feedfetcher-Google
/ahm/blogs.sun.com-7d.atom 1 readers via Bloglines/3.1

/dropsafe/articles/project/index.rss 2 readers via Mozilla/5.0

/dropsafe/articles/security/index.rss 24 readers via Bloglines/3.1
/dropsafe/articles/security/index.rss 16 readers via Feedfetcher-Google
/dropsafe/articles/security/index.rss 4 readers via NewsGatorOnline/2.0
/dropsafe/articles/security/index.rss 1 readers via Mozilla/5.0
/dropsafe/articles/security/index.rss 0 readers via YandexBlog/0.99.101

The first three feeds are all the same data, supplied by different URLs, so that would make 146 readers subscribed to the top level feed via various aggregators. There’s probably some duplication in that figure, but the trick is not to care so much about that, as to measure its growth, if any.

Comments

5 responses to “My Feeds And Who Reads Them”

  1. 217.169.41.113
    re: My Feeds And Who Reads Them

    Maybe its about participation as well as readership!

  2. 217.169.41.113
    re: My Feeds And Who Reads Them

    Maybe its about participation as well as readership!

  3. alecm
    re: My Feeds And Who Reads Them

    True; regrettably that is again something that is hard to measure, and I am dealing with people who are scared and uncomfortable, and for whom graphs are more impressive than actual conversation.

  4. Gilles Gravier
    re: My Feeds And Who Reads Them

    So… I’m wondering what my Sony Ericsson W850 phone looks like in terms of being a user agent for RSS. Since I’m going to assume not many directly read this blog from their cell phone, I’m probably one of the “1 readers”… and I use the /dropsafe/index.rss URL…

    That would make me a Hatena user?

    But why doesn’t Liferea not appear either?

    Strange…

    Gilles.

  5. alecm
    re: My Feeds And Who Reads Them

    RSS readers generate different User-Agent strings from Aggregators; the above stats are generated by grepping for UserAgent strings that contain variations upon:

    …Aggregating on behalf of 42 subscribers

    -type messages; so I get several hundred RSS readers per day, but rather fewer fetches from such web-aggregators.

    So your phone won’t feature at all in the above, sorry…

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