eXtra For Every Publisher

If you use FeedBurner for your RSS feed managment, you might be in for quite a shock, despite you not wanting to show your audience how many subscribers you have, you may be showing your competition how well, or how poorly you are doing.

FeedBurner provides a small chicklet which shows your current subscriber rates on your blog. Many prominent bloggers love to show off their feed counts, and display the badge prominently. The service is FeedCount, and if you have enabled it, anyone can view your current subscriber rates.

• Feeds on FeedBurner are usually formatted as http://feeds.feedburner.com/feedname
• To view the FeedCount badge, add ~fc/ before the feedname
• The new url should then be formatted like http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/feedname

If the FeedCount service is inactive, then you will come to an ugly page telling you so, but from my tests, most people using FeedBurner have activated the FeedCount service.

Here are a few examples of sites where you can see their feed count.

Problogger.net - he shows his feed count publicly, but it can be a good check to make sure it is not a faked graphic. Like we had any doubt.

The Blog Beat

Self Made Minds

Blogging Fingers

So if you don’t want to show off such numbers, then deactivate the FeedCount service or if you are so inclined, post the graphic on your blog, and proudly display how well you are doing.