During a late night web search, xFruits were recommended as an answer to a couple of RSS related prayers. They came up trumps with one issue, we think!

20 readers is worse than none

There has been talk around the internet about not publicising RSS visitor numbers, unless there is something to brag about. Techcrunch have 350k bragging rights, but it makes sense that anyone with under 50 has a way to go before they should even make a peep. However, some sites, like us, have several RSS feeds, which some bright sparks are saying, could be combine to produce a feed count to die for - or at least, not blush to. xFruits goes some way to solving that issue.

Combining several feeds is now a doddle!

Stage one seems to be, to aggregate all your feed info. xFruits is a fancy French mashup of code that allows anyone with half a brain to copy and paste their multitudinous feed urls into a fruity dashboard. Chic alors voilå, one mega feed is created and you are good to go with an icon, but no feed count..

xFruit to Feedburner

The xfruits feed is, I think, more accessible than Feedburner's, but it has no feed counter, and FB does. To hurry things along, basically, I passed the xFruits mega feed through Feedburner. It worked a treat and dutifully produced a faithful Feedburner feed. It was looking good, but I had the smug smile wiped off my face when the combined feed counter idea fell on its face.

How to display the total number of visitors?

Trouble is, Feedburner doesn't know about the combo job, and treats the URL as if it were starting from zero. Bollocks, that isnt quite good enough. I want a way to have the individual counts remembered and then lump all the feed counts together to produce one bragging big number. Bloody computers.

Any ideas would be welcome, especially as I would like to install the icons site-wide. But I will hang back till I can resolve the feed count issue. Any thoughts, please let Ed know. And by the way, how did Techcrunch get such massive subscriber numbers?