I use — and love — a service called FeedBurner to manage the RSS feeds for my sites. FeedBurner allows me to control how my feeds are displayed, to insert ads in feeds, and to track how many subscribers I have. They offer a “chicklet” which displays how many readers a particular site has. I was opposed to this at first (I can’t remember why), but now I find it rather useful, and actually consider it a form of promotional advertising: “Look! GRS has 5000 subscribers — why don’t you subscribe, too?”
I thought it would be fun to link to the FeedBurner chicklet for my various sites. Since the numbers change daily (as subscribership rises and falls), I’ve noted the current counts in parentheses (as of 01 Feb 2007) . I’ve also jotted a few notes about each site. (By the way, you can subscribe to any of these sites by clicking on the appropriate chicklet.)
Get Rich Slowly (6784 readers) — Yes, GRS really is read by over 6000 daily subscribers right now. (And 600 people subscribe via e-mail.) I try not to think about it. It’s a little scary. GRS readership has hovered above 6500 for the past few days, but I expect it to drop to around 5000 before long. (The method FeedBurner uses to measure subscribers seems finicky, and is greatly influenced by “pick-ups” from large sites.)
foldedspace.org (330 readers) — Who are all you people? For a personal blog, this site enjoys a moderate readership. I attribute it to the wide variety of topics I discuss. But maybe people just like my cat pictures.
Money Hacks (93 readers) — The new GRS companion site already has about 100 subscribers. I just went public with the site on February 1st, though I haven’t made any sort of official “grand opening” announcement. I’m just test-driving it for now.
Four Color Comics (31 readers) — The Four Color Comics subscribers are wonderful, long-suffering folk. I’ve maybe posted ten entries there in the past six months. I do plan to post here more often, though, and to remodel the look, which I hate.
Animal Intelligence (23 readers) — This number is actually in the mid-30s on days that I post an entry. This brings up another point: the FeedBurner numbers rise and fall depending on how much is posted to a site, so I don’t think they truly reflect the number of “subscribers”, but possibly the number of feedreaders that ping a site in a day. Geeky talk, I know, but it’s stuff I think about.
Bibliophilic (11 readers) — My new book site actually has some readers already! This is going to be an odd one to gauge. Bibliophilic is going to be rather schizophrenic, home to all my various book reviews (comic book, personal finance, and otherwise), as well as thoughts on book news. The target reader is basically me, which I’m sure you’ll agree is a pretty narrow audience.
Vintage Pop (3 readers) — Who are the people subscribing to Vintage Pop? It’s not even a real weblog yet! I currently use it as a workspace to post guest entries for other sites, entries for which I need the author to approve my edits. Three subscribers? Why?
Believe it or not, I’m done adding weblogs to my little internet empire. This is about all that I can handle. Now I’d like to shepherd the ones I have and see if I can’t get them to grow.
I subscribe to foldedspace.org primarily for the cat stories. Oh, and the stories where you visit friends & family and play with their children; Dunno why.
Right. So The New York Times outed Money Hacks between the time I wrote this and the time I posted it, thus the high subscriber count. I guess I kind of *did* hint about the site in the hopes that Damon would mention it, but I didn’t think anything would come of it…
So now you need a fancy name for your system of blogs, like the Roth Information Network. ^Or maybe Gawker.^
I read folded space because I like your “voice”. If “an unexamined life is not worth living”, then you have a very worthy life. Thanks for sharing it.
I’ve been reading your site for so many years now I can’t even remember how I found you, but obviously, like Jessie said, I like your “voice”. You’re very real and accessible.
And you post lots of things about cats! 🙂
I also love your Animal Intelligence site and visit it almost every day. I turned a friend of mine onto it, too, and I know he has it bookmarked so he must be visiting periodically as well.
I’ve moved a lot of the blogs I read to a reader (yours being one of them). Not only do I enjoy getting everything in one big bowl of goodness in the morning, but in cases like yours, where you have multiple blogs, I can catch them all without having to visit the sites individually.