How to be a good feed fetcher?

Feed analytics obviously depend on the good behaviour of feed fetchers and RSS clients in general.

To allow services like FeedPress to deliver the best analytics to their users, every feed fetcher should adopt the Google Reader User-Agent formatting:

Feedfetcher-Google; (+http://www.google.com/feedfetcher.html; 16 subscribers; feed-id=12310981209483785)

The User-Agent has four parts:

First part: Your service name. Useful to let the content creators get some analytics.

Second part: An URL to get more informations about your fetcher, how does it work, etc.

Third part: The number of subscribers on your service. Because one request doesn't mean only one subscriber. And make sure to have the word "subscribers".

Fourth part: The Feed ID. It's very important to have a feed ID in every request, because you can refresh the same feed but have different URLs for it in your system.