Prompted by Steve Trefethen, who got over 1,000 feed subscribers I started wondering how much traffic the non-HTML site of my site makes. My poor man stats shows the following for a random day:

The 5,729 hits come from three separate feeds (atom, rss with no content, and rss with content that has the lion share). Now of course a single user can make dozens of hits in a day, but some feed aggregators can serve many users with a single content request to my site. For example, I see the following tag lines, among hundreds:

Bloglines/3.1 (http://www.bloglines.com; 47 subscribers
Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 190 subscribers; feed-id=11280514935460541113)
Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 109 subscribers; feed-id=15802403899434081738)
Netvibes (http://www.netvibes.com/; 13 subscribers)
NewsGatorOnline/2.0 (http://www.newsgator.com; 33 subscribers)
YahooFeedSeeker/2.0 (compatible; Mozilla 4.0; MSIE 5.5; http://publisher.yahoo.com/rssguide; users 1; views 224)

    

Many hits come from browsers, which have tons of similar tag lines, with two standing out:

      600 from Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 5.1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322;
.NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.0.04506.30; InfoPath.2; .NET CLR
3.0.04506.648; MSOffice 12)

      234 from Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.1.13) Gecko/20080311 Firefox/2.0.0.13

What the conclusion of this post? It is very hard to track usage of your feed manually, so I've resolved to use the service offered by FeedBurner. The feed is at http://feeds.feedburner.com/marcocantublog but I'll redirect the existing feeds, so you be "moved" to the new service automatically (and hopefully smoothly). yes, I'll take advantage of this to server some advertising and convey more information, something I don't terribly like buyt helps paying for the server and its bandwidth.