Online RSS readers send follower counts in their user agent string
Written by Stefan Judis
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This post is part of my Today I learned series in which I share all my web development learnings.
Short and sweet. Darek Kay shared that you can figure out how many people are subscribed to your blog's RSS feed. When Inoreader, Feedbin or Feedly query the feed, they'll include a subscriber count in the user agent header.
"GET /atom.xml" 304 0 "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; inoreader.com; 9 subscribers)"
"GET /atom.xml" 304 0 "Feedbin feed-id:1524967 - 5 subscribers"
"GET /atom.xml" 304 0 "Feedly/1.0 (+http://www.feedly.com/fetcher.html; 16 subscribers; like FeedFetcher-Google)"
My site runs on Netlify, and unfortunately, I don't have the setup to parse logs, but I'm intrigued to set this up. 🙈
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Frontend nerd with over ten years of experience, freelance dev, "Today I Learned" blogger, conference speaker, and Open Source maintainer.