With the launch and reasonable level of success of my Rmail service, I began wondering how to get that subscriber count reported by FeedBurner above 1. Since Rmail is a centralized Web based service, FeedBurner reports one subscriber regardless of the actual number of subscribers. But Bloglines, another similar centralized Web based RSS aggregator reports the actual number of subscribes by passing extra bits in the HTTP request. I spun off an email to Eric Lunt and he responded with the How-To's.
Bloglines overloads their User-Agent HTTP header and stuffs in the number of subscribers. Example shown.
Bloglines/2.0 (http://www.bloglines.com; 12 subscribers)
You then fork off an email to the FeedBurner team and they re-config their back-end to pick up the extra info. That's it! Very simple.
Update: MyYahoo! and LiveJournal also report subscribers.
