Archive for: rss feeds

How to Fix the FeedBurner Counter Problem

CatsWhoBlog presents a very interesting and effective option to display an average feed reader value using FeedBurner stats.

There are three facts existing in today’s 2.0 worls about feeds:

1. FeedBurner represents, even before Google acquired this company, the preferred service used for RSS feeds.
2. All bloggers, web sites and companies, which base most of their strategy in number of visitors; know that having a nice way to show the popularity of your website is a key factor for attracting more loyal visitors, advertisements, etc.
3. FeedBurner values change tremendously every day, if you are not publishing on daily basis.

To fix this problem, we can use this code in functions.php which will use the average readers from the last 7 days, a number more accurate for our RSS feed (download the TXT for functions.php):

function get_average_readers($feed_id,$interval = 7){
	$today = date('Y-m-d', strtotime("now"));
	$ago = date('Y-m-d', strtotime("-".$interval." days"));
	$feed_url="https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=".$feed_id."&dates=".$ago.",".$today;
	$ch = curl_init();
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $feed_url);
	$data = curl_exec($ch);
	curl_close($ch);
	$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
	$fb = $xml->feed->entry['circulation'];

	$nb = 0;
	foreach($xml->feed->children() as $circ){
		$nb += $circ['circulation'];
	}

	return round($nb/$interval);
}

Once done, you can call the function wherever you want in your theme files. Pass your Feedburner feed id as a parameter (download the TXT for this example):

<?php
$nb = get_average_readers('catswhocode');
echo "I have ".$nb." RSS readers";
?>