How To Display Your Feedburner Subscriber Count In Plain Text

You have likely noticed that many bloggers choose to display their RSS subscriber count on their blogs. The most common way to do that is by using the little button graphic which Feedburner provides.

A fancier way to do it is to display it in plain-text format, thereby allowing you to style it in whatever way suits your blog.

When I made some recent design changes to DavidRisley.com, I decided to display the FeedCount using plain text. Below is how I went about it…

#1 – Enable The Awareness API

First of all, you need to be using Feedburner for this approach to work. With that said, go into your Feedburner account, choose the right feed, then click on the “Publicize” tab.

On the right menu, you’ll see “Awareness API”. You want to go enable that.

#2 – Use this PHP Code

It takes a little bit of PHP wizardry to tap into the Feedburner API. So, what I did was use the following code and I placed it into a file all by itself. I called that file feed.php and I placed it into the same folder as my active theme. Here is that code:

<?php
$feedcount = get_option("feedrsscount");
if ($feedcount['lastcheck'] < (mktime()-3600)) {
//get cool feedburner count
$whaturl=https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=davidrisley;
//Initialize the Curl session
$ch = curl_init();
//Set curl to return the data instead of printing it to the browser.
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
//Set the URL
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $whaturl);
//Execute the fetch
$data = curl_exec($ch);
//Close the connection
curl_close($ch);
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
$fb = $xml->feed->entry['circulation'];
$feedcount['count'] = number_format($fb);
//end get cool feedburner count
$feedcount['lastcheck'] = mktime();
update_option("feedrsscount",$feedcount);
}
echo $feedcount['count'];
?>

This code is designed to fetch the count and store it in your WordPress options table in the database. It will check the feed count once per hour. This saves server load of having to load up a remote URL on every page view. Quite frankly, it could probably be decreased because I think Feedburner only updates counts every 24 hours anyway. But, anywho…

One important thing is to modify the URL in the code above for your feed. Where you see “davidrisley”, you need to change that to be the identifier for your RSS feed. Basically, whatever comes AFTER the “http://feeds.feedburner.com/” in your Feedburner address is your feed ID.

So, once again, save that into a file called “feed.php” and place it into your theme folder via FTP.

#3 – Include the Code

The last part is simply to include feed.php in your theme wherever you want your feed count to display. Do this as follows:

<?php include(“feed.php”); ?>

That’s it. From there, you will need to do any styling of it on your own.

Bonus Tips

The obvious use of this is just to slap it in your blog’s sidebar. However, you can get a little more creative in your use of it.

Social proof is a huge concept in marketing. The idea that many other people do something makes it more likely a new person will do it, too. Call it “safety in numbers”, I guess.

So, you can use the feed count in order to add social proof to the idea of subscribing to your RSS feed or even your mailing list. Obviously, this is only going to work if you have a decent number of subscribers (perhaps 500 or more). Otherwise, it could work against you.

Tip #1:  Wherever you want to advertise your RSS feed, you could use the feed count to do something like “XXXX people subscribe to this”. It adds social proof.

Tip #2: If you set up a “blog broadcast” in Aweber and plug in the URL of your Feedburner feed, Aweber will report back your number of email subscribers to Feedburner and jack up your feed count. In this way, you can make the Feedburner count be more reflective of your EMAIL LIST than your RSS subscribers. Then, you could do the same thing, but instead draw people into your email list.

For example, here is a concept of something I’m working on for PCMech:

You might give it a try. But, certainly, this works a lot better when you can build the count right into your theme and avoid using that little chicklet button.

Hope you found that helpful. Let me know! And if you have any questions, post a comment.