Update: The CTO of feedburner says this trick doesn’t report accurate results for desktop readers currently but offers a way to improve it (thanks). I also added a creative commons license to the code if you think you can improve it, go for it, just attribute the original!
Major Update 1: WP Plugin: Feedburner Feed Stats
» You can get feedburner subscriber stats without sending a single one of your visitors to feedburner.
» It doesn’t require any hacking or exploits, just simply modifying your own rss feed.
» In the following article I’ll show you exactly how it’s done and how you can start seeing the results instantly!
Why Not Use Feedburner “As Is” For Stats?
Most people have concerns that their entire rss readership is subscribed to a third party and NOT to themselves. If feedburner went out of business tomorrow you would be up a creek.
Feedburner allows your burned feed on their site get indexed and rank in the search engines, which is a major party foul.
Also my feedreader of choice, sharpreader, has a hard time with autodiscovery of feedburner feeds.
How To Get Feedburner Stats Without Using Feedburner On Your Blog
disclaimer: backup any file before modifying it
First the summary of how it’s done:
1. Sign up for feedburner and burn your feed.
2. Add code below to your rss feed replacing “yourfeedhere” with your feedburner feed name
Thats it! Your dialy subsribers will take until the next day to update, however your live hits will start showing instantly!
Step By Step of how it’s done (with video tutorial):
1. Sign up for feedburner and burn your feed. (that didn’t change)
2. Take the new feed name you just created and replace the blue text below with it:
$ch = curl_init();
$useragent=$_SERVER[’HTTP_USER_AGENT’];
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, $useragent);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $feedburnerfeed);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
Code licensing only (modify away just attribute the source):
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
3. Copy and paste the code snippet above into your rss feed file, in a php section, and upload to your server.
That’s it! Are your eyes glazed over and you still need a bit more help? I made the next video just for you!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0_etJ5WQC7s
Proof of concept
The image on the right is what feedburner says this website’s weekly visitors amount to.
However I don’t have a single subscriber here using feedburner (check my feed links on the right, none go to feedburner).
And what about that cool subscriber breakdown everybody shows off?
You can have that too 😉 Here’s mine:
Conclusion
I enjoyed discovering and writing about this feedburner trick. I believe this blog post has great appeal and I want the world to know about it.
If you’ve enjoyed this post please bookmark it, digg it, and share it with your friends. If you mention this feedburner post on your blog I’ll include a link back to you below (shoot me an email so I don’t miss it).