Oct 24 2007
Cool Tool for the Subscriber Voyeurs
This might not be of interest to many, but recently I’ve started adding FeedBurner subscriber numbers to the top 100 Aussie bloggers list. It’s a bit of a pain having to manually collect all the subscriber numbers, which I usually do via a direct inquiry with a URL something like this – http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/LifeHack.
Yes, I know there is some way to automate the enquiries – it’s just way beyond my technological ability.
Anyhow, now thanks to the wonders of widgetry, and someone obviously much more clever than I (merci beaucoup Christophe), I can simply plug all the feed names into a little FeedBurner count widget and voila! the feed subscriber counts appear magically.
This can be added to iGoogle (which is what I’ve done), Netvibes and a few other places. You simply plug the list of feed names (e.g. “LifeHack” in the example above) and separate them with a semi-colon.
Here’s a look at how it displays (and you can also monitor traffic if you’re particularly voyeuristic).
Naturally, this only works on blogs that have “Awareness API” activated (see here if you’re not sure what that’s about).
So now you can monitor your competition, without having to visit their blog.
But for me, this is a very cool time-saving widget.
(In case you missed the link – SK FeedBurner Stats.)
8 Responses to “Cool Tool for the Subscriber Voyeurs”
You are Gadget Gal. So many useful tips and more evidence of the power of sharing amongst bloggers.
Colin – LOL, those who cannot create, report 😉
Coolness. (Once I figure it out, that is!)
Good perhaps for those of us who are still using multiple feeds?!!?! (ie. people will see that one blog may have one or two or three going simultaneously)……?
It’s not too hard (email me if you need to).
I don’t think this will really help with multiple feeds though, as you’ve got to be aware of them to track them. Typically what would be used is the current feed. Sorry
You’re welcome 😀
And thank to you for the post
Just one thing, it doesn’t work with other places than Netvibes & iGoogle (and Blog Widget Standalone maybe), because the UWA technology of Netvibes is very complicated and i don’t have the time to develop the widget anymore 😉
ShadowKris
Thanks again for the great widget! Is there much else other than iGoogle and Netvibes anyway? Ce n’est pas rien.
Clever use of the tools, I will try to get this going myself. Always good to keep one eye on what everyone else is up to
Hi Steve
Nice to meet you and your blog – I like the green
The only problem is that if you’re the competitive type, it could be depressing