Pete FreitagFinding Feed subscribers from the User Agent
I just noticed last week that some of the online web aggregators (such as bloglines, newsgator online, live journal, etc) will send the number of subscribers in their HTTP user agent. For example:
NewsGatorOnline/2.0_(http://www.newsgator.com;_20_subscribers) Bloglines/2.0_(http://www.bloglines.com;_81_subscribers) ThePort_Web/1.0;_subscribers_1 LiveJournal.com_([email protected];_for_your_url/;_1_readers)
Note that live journal is using _num_readers instead of _num_subscribers. There is no standard for this as far as I know, but it would be nice if they all played together nice.
This is really handy for a site like dealazon that lets you create RSS feeds dynamically (there are hundreds of different RSS feeds currently being served). Using these user agents I can get an estimate of how many subscribers there are.
Like this? Follow me ↯
Tweet Follow @pfreitagFinding Feed subscribers from the User Agent was first published on July 25, 2005.
If you like reading about rss, xml, stats, analytics, or http then you might also like:
- Guestimating blog feed readers
- The Proper Content Type for XML Feeds
- Foundeo's 2007 End of the Year Sale
- 8 Ways to Save Bandwidth on your RSS Feed
- Apple still likes their RSS icon
- Simple Flex Tutorial
- SoloSub is for button addicts
- Howto Create an RSS 2.0 Feed
YahooFeedSeeker/1.0 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0; MSIE 5.5; http://my.yahoo.com/s/publishers.html; users 2; views 169)