JasonSanzone is one of the authors of Jetpacked.com, JasonSanzone.com is his personal site.

A lot of blogs display their RSS feed subscriber count via the FeedBurner “FeedCount” chicklet. And if they have a lot of subscribers, you know they’re pretty popular, and they have pretty good content so you’ll probably subscribe to their feed and boost that number up one more digit. But what happens when you go to a blog, and they have a FeedCount of say, 10 or 20. You don’t feel so inclined to subscribe to that blog do you? Well, I have discovered a way to exploit the FeedBurner Feed Count. Just follow these simple steps, and you’ll be on your way to RSS superstardom.

Before I list the steps:
I’m sorry, I know I am unleashing a monster into the blogosphere. From now on, you won’t be able to tell who’s FeedCount is real or not.

Step 1:
Sign up for a (new) gMail account.

Step 2:
(Assuming you already have a FeedBurner feed)
Use the + feature in your gMail email address to subscribe to your feed however many times you’d like. Go to your feed page, click subscribe by email. Then enter your email address using the + suffix. Here’s an example. Let’s say you registered with gMail as Johnny@gmail.com, you can now use something like Johnny+1@gmail.com. The mail will still get delivered to your inbox, but you can use it as a completely separate address. This can go on forever. (+2@gmail.com, +3@gmail.com). FeedBurner will treat these subscriptions like completely new email subscriptions every time, and they will count for your FeedCount number.

Step 3: (The annoying part)
You will have to manually opt-in and approve all of the subscriptions you created. This could take hours depending on the amount of emails and subscriptions you faked. I guess it’s the price you pay for exploiting the system. After you approve all of the subscriptions, you will see the change in your FeedCount within the next day.

I apologize once again for making this known, but information is information. Maybe FeedBurner will come up with a fix. Also, I did not test this out into a high number, I only did a few dozen subscriptions on a new feed, but I’m pretty sure it will work as many times as you need it to. I did not do this experiment on the Jetpacked.com RSS feed. So feel free to subscribe.

What happened to social networking is now happening to social news. At first, there was only Digg and a few also-rans. Shoutwire and reddit have seen modest success. But now, just as niche social network sites like LinkedIn, Dogster, etc. have risen in popularity, so to are we seeing a surge in niche social news sites. One of the hottest entrants into the field is news.ycombinator.com, the brainchild of entrepreneur, Lisp hacker, and best-selling author/essayist, Paul Graham. Despite looking a lot like reddit (a YCombinator startup), news.YCombinator.com is actually written in Arc, a dialect of Lisp. But that probably doesn’t mean much to all but a few hardcore programming geeks out there. The real goldmine of News.YC is the community, links and resources featured on the site.

Link: news.ycombinator.com

About the poster: Shanti Braford has sold three web companies, grossing thousands monthly and attracting tens of thousands of visitors daily. He blogs regularly at On Web Apps.

We’re in the middle of redesigning the site (again). We’re adding some really cool stuff and integrating a tool that will allow users and readers to easily promote their website on Jetpacked.com. Stay tuned…

How many of us have spent a while in photoshop making line backgrounds. I know I have. That’s why I was ecstatic when I came across Stripe Generator. It allows you to quickly and easily generate all types of striped backgrounds, you have full control over things like gradients, stripe width, stripe color, and you can even do multiple colored stripes. Definately check it out.

Jetpacked will be changing within the coming week. It will be redesigned and become solely a marketing, business, and design blog. It will no longer be a hub for all of the Spontent products. You will be able to find all of the products and blogs of Spontent at spontent.com. Support for the JetTools Suite of products will still be available at JetpackedSupport.com So stick around, keep reading, subscribe to the RSS feed, and get ready for some cool stuff.