Short rss feeds

I've shortened my RSS feeds, please click on the link to get the full article, you'll see why below... with that said...

Ever since I moved the blog back from web.mac.com to my own servers, as I have said before, I am receiving alot more traffic than before.  At present I am getting about 4000-4500 hits a day, which isn't much in the grand scheme of things, but when you go from getting 1000 hits a day, to 4x that a day, it really makes a difference in servers, server load, and ability to serve content to readers to keep it interesting.

So, I'm trying to get an accurate metric of how many people read the blog.  Problem is, I have tons of people that read me through rss and atom feeds (btw -- the atom feed is being kept alive manually, I'll stop doing this shortly.  Please subscribe to the rss feed. http://www.joelesler.net/rss.xml).  

Most blog aggregation services will tell you in the "GET" request how many people they are aggregating for.  Google does this, Newslines does this, and Bloglines does this.  So thanks to them for that.  But these obscure blog readers; and individual blog readers that read in Safari, or Mail.app, or NetNewsWire, there is no good way to get a count from them.  You've got people coming from different IP's.  You have people coming from multiple IP's (do i count them as two?)  So it's tricky.

So what I did was, shortened the rss.xml feed.  That way, in hopes that you guys click into the site and read the full post, so I can get an accurate count.

I have every intention of making the rss feed full length again, let's say I'll do it next week.  So don't worry, you'll get your full feeds.   But for now, I am just trying to get an accurate count.

I've also posted some convenient "subscribe here" buttons on the right --------->

so if you read from one of those readers, feel free to add me there.  Notice that I've added the ones that give me counts :)

Thanks for your patience while I get this stuff done.