Feed Icons – Home of the Standard Web Feed Icon
Feed Icons – Home of the Standard Web Feed Icon
|
|
… examples of different ways you can use it with minimal HTML and CSS. … CSS … “feed-button”><a href=”#”>Comments Feed</a></p> CSS: .feed-button { padding: …
Similar Posts
Fixing a Bad Feedburner Subscriber Count
Google’s Feedburner is a fantastic service for managing RSS feeds and delivering useful statistics on those feeds, and they have a great API (application programming interface) for pulling those statistics and displaying them on your site. But lately, I’ve run into occasional problems getting at the information that Feedburner collects. Here’s the solution that I’ve developed for dealing with Feedburner’s flops.
I’m using Francesco Mapelli’s Feed Count WordPress plugin to display the number of feed subscribers I’ve accrued. It’s a great little plugin that allows you to generate a custom message associated with your feed stats. For example, in the subscribe section of my sidebar, there’s a little message that, as I write this, reads, “Join 2449 other happy readers!” That’s the Feed Count plugin at work. I find it preferable to those little Feedburner “chicklets” that are scattered around the web these days.
But here’s the problem: when Feed Count makes a call to Feedburner to grab my latest subscriber stats, sometimes Feedburner drops the ball when it returns the number. Instead of returning the number of subscribers, it will sometimes return a “N/A” instead, suggesting Feedburner couldn’t find my stats, and resulting in a sentence that reads “Join N/A other happy readers!” Not quite the message I intended. And worse, sometimes Feedburner will return a big fat zero if it can’t find my stats — and “Join 0 happy readers!” is definitely not the impression I’m hoping to make on first-time visitors.
So what’s my solution? When in doubt, turn to JavaScript.
A JavaScript Solution
I first wrote this JavaScript solution in the last iteration of CSS Newbie when I finally got sick of being greeted every morning with my “not available” subscriber count:
$spans = document.getElementById('subbox').getElementsByTagName('span');
if($spans[4].innerHTML=="N/A" || $spans[4].innerHTML=="0") {
$spans[4].innerHTML = "thousands of";
}
This solution relies heavily on the XHTML structure generated by the Feed Count plugin, but the concept could be edited to work with most any solution. Basically, I’m using JavaScript to find the 5th span (counting starts at 0) inside the #subbox id, which is the span generated by Feed Count that holds my subscriber count. The code checks the contents of that span, and if it finds one of the two dreaded values — N/A or 0 — it replaces that content with the phrase “thousands of” instead. It’s not as specific as I’d like, but it certainly gets the point across.
A jQuery Option
When I rebuilt CSS Newbie recently, I decided to upgrade this script to work with jQuery. I was already using jQuery for a few other effects on the page, so it made sense to cut down on the size of my code where available. Here’s the much smaller jQuery solution:
if($(".subscribers").html() == "N/A" || $(".subscribers").html() == "0") {
$(".subscribers").html("thousands of");
}
This code does essentially the same as the JavaScript above but in fewer lines and, I personally think, with greater clarity. It looks for the contents of the element with the “.subscribers” class (which would have been an absolute bear to do with JavaScript due to the lack of a getElementsByClass function) and replaces it if it’s on our no-go list.
This is how I’ve gotten around the inconsistencies of the Feedburner API. If you have other solutions or ideas you’d like to share, I’d love to hear them in the comments!
How to Fix WordPress Feedburner Plugins After Converting to Google Feedburner
I ran into (yet another) Feed Count + Feedburner problem recently, shortly after writing my last article on accounting for Feedburner’s subscriber count mistakes. And since I heard from a few people who are also using the Feed Count plugin, I thought I should share this info.
The Backstory
As I’m sure all you Feedburner users out there are well aware, Google purchased Feedburner quite some time ago. But until recently, that didn’t mean much: the same people were working on the code, your information was stored in the same place and was represented the same way, and so on.
But recently Google has begun bringing Feedburner more fully into the fold. As a result, all Feedburner users are being required to convert their Feedburner accounts into Google accounts. That created quite a few headaches for lots of people (including myself) right off the bat, as it took a good week for Google to nail down my subscriber numbers with any accuracy – one day I would have thousands of subscribers, the next I might have zero, and the day following only a few hundred.
A New Problem
However, even once Google started reporting my Feedburner numbers correctly, I still had a problem: my Feed Count plugin no longer grabbed my subscription statistics. Now, this wasn’t as huge a problem as it could have been, because I had my jQuery Feeburner fix in place… but I still wanted my real subscriber stats back at some point.
After a bit of digging, I found the problem: as part of their conversion from Feedburner to “Google” Feedburner, Google changed the location of their API. Thus, any plugins that used the old Feedburner API ceased functioning once that user’s account was successfully ported to Google.
The Solution
Long-term, the best solution would be for the plugin developers to update and release new versions of their plugins. But as of now, the Feed Count plugin has not been updated – and since it hasn’t seen an update since last July, I’m not going to hold my breath on a new version. So I decided to take matters into my own hands and edit my copy of the Feed Count plugin.
Note: this solution is specific to the Feed Count plugin, but any brave souls out there could probably modify and use this information to update other plugins as well.
I opened up my copy of the Feed Count plugin file (feedcount.php) and found this function:
function mapelli_fc_get_defaults() {
return array(
'map_fc_feedurl' => '',
'map_fc_queryurl' =>'http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=',
'map_fc_lastcount' => 'N/A',
'map_fc_lastupdate' => 0,
'map_fc_updateinterval' => 60, // 1 h
'map_fc_error_updateinterval' => 5, // 5 min
);
}
This function mostly sets all the plugin defaults, but it also sets the “queryurl” – the website that the plugin hits to find your subscriber count information. This URL is not customizable anywhere inside WordPress, and since this URL has now changed, we’re forced to edit the plugin itself.
All I had to do was change the “map_fc_queryurl” line to read this instead:
'map_fc_queryurl' =>'https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=',
Then I saved the plugin, uploaded it to my server, and my stats started showing up again! However, it’d still recommend putting something like this JavaScript fix in place for those random times when Feedburner drops the ball (and your subscriber count).
Note: Your stats probably won’t start showing up again instantly. You’ll have to wait for the duration of your “update interval,” which can be configured in WordPress under Settings -> Feed Count:
If you’re using a different plugin and have run into this same problem, please give this solution a try and let people know in the comments if it worked. Thanks!
