I care about you, dear RSS reader and when another one of you subscribes to Common Craft - it makes my day. Like so many other people, I keep tabs on the count of subscribers Feedburner provides because I think it's a good measure of salience. That's why I'm so encouraged lately.
The last thing I wanted in the recent migration to Drupal was to leave any RSS subscribers behind by not migrating their feed over to the new site. In trying to ensure this I spent way too much time obsessing over things I don't fully understand (atom vs. rss vs. rdf). In the end, I discovered something: Feedburner was only hooked into one feed. In fact, my wife and a couple of friends were subscribed to the non-feedburner feed. Ack!
With the help of Lyal, my Drupal guy and Boris, we redirected the old feeds into Feedburner - and for the first time saw the actual subscriber numbers. To my delight, the subscriber number doubled the first day and then quadrupled from the original over two days. For the last three days it's been mostly static, so I think it's accurate now. Last week I saw myself as a three digit blogger - this week, I'm four. It's like a gift from the Internet, sorta.
If you're new to RSS, read: RSS in Plain English.