Jun 18th, 2007 by admin 4,637 Views
Many blogs that are using Feedburner to display their feeds, choose to not display the “Feedburner feed count chicklet” to hide the low number of RSS readers they have. Even if don’t have many RSS subscribers, I decided to display the feed count chicklet to let my new visitors know how many people have subscribed to Linkrain’s RSS feed yet. However, even if many webmasters decide to hide their counter, it is very easy to discover the number of RSS readers of most blogs using Feedburner just by making a little change in the original feed url.
All you have to do is open the feed page of blog and add ” /~fc/ ” after “.com” and before the name of the blog. Here is a quick example:
the feed url of my blog is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/LinkrainArticles; by changing this url in your browser into http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/LinkrainArticles you will see the feed reader counter displaying the total number of blog readers even if I would decide to remove the counter from my sidebar.
This does not work for every blog that is using Feedburner to display it’s feed, because you can hide your reader count in your Feedburner account settings. If you don’t want to show your visitors the total number of RSS subscribers and don’t want people to use this trick to find out your reader number, follow this three quick steps:
- Log in your Feedburner account
- Click the “Publicize tab”, scroll down and click “FeedCount”
- When you are on the “FeedCount page” scroll down to the bottom and press the “Deactivate” button in the lower right corner
That’s all. Now nobody will be able to see your FeedCounter even by using the trick described above.
Some bloggers would say that by displaying your feed count actually helps in getting more long term traffic to your blog only if your feed subscribers have reached a certain number….some comments?
Hmm…I just noticed that Linkrain’s feed counter chicklet is not showing any feed subscribers. Does this mean you’re not using this feature anymore?
Actually I see “37 readers” in my Feedburner chicklet…
cool tip, thanks
This tip is quite helpful to hide your feedburner count, but displaying a larger feedburner count makes your site more popular which makes new visitors more likely to stick.