Feedburner provides its users a way to show off their subscriber count using a feature called Chicklet. Some bloggers use it while others don’t and then there some who put up a hacked chicklet image showing an inflated subscribers count.
In this post I will show you a quick way to find out the actual subscriber count of any feedburner id from Google Chrome’s address bar.
With the below URL, replacing ‘feed‘ with actual feed name, you can know the exact subscriber count of any feed, provided they have the FeedCount service activated.
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~fc/feed
It’s simple but why type the long URL every time? By using Google Chrome Custom Search Engine feature we can avoid the unnecessary typing.
Add a new search engine:
Enter a name, a special keyword and paste the above URL. Here replace ‘feed‘ with ‘%s‘ and save.
Now to find the subscriber count, just enter the keyword followed by the feedburner id in your address bar and you’ll be returned a chiklet showing readership count.
The above URL is able to find the feed count because the user has ‘FeedCount‘ feature activated. This option can be found under Publicize tab in Feedburner admin.
If the option is disabled, you will get an error as this:
