Tag Archives: feeds

Getting RSS and Twitter Subscriber Counts in WordPress

Jul 22, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Coding, Featured 16 Comments

I previously wrote a post about how some blogs are displaying their RSS subscriber and Twitter follower counts. Mac AppStorm is combining their Twitter and RSS counts into one number, and FreelanceSwitch has a section in their footer with separate readouts for RSS, Twitter, and their podcast. Today I’d like to show you how to actually implement such a thing.

We’ll be using PHP and cURL to retrieve the numbers, and then caching them in the database with WordPress’s get_option() and update_option() functions, so we don’t slow things down or use-up your Twitter API limit.

Continue reading →

Google Responds to Criticism of FeedBurner Migration

Jan 28, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Services and Tools 2 Comments

As you may already know, Google has set a deadline for you to migrate your feeds over to their new system tied to your Google Account. The move hasn’t been as smooth as it could have been so far, and there has been much criticism over it. I’ve certainly done my fair share of complaining. (My stats were at 20% for several days, and 1and1 complains that the CNAME for MyBrand is too long.)

Mashable was granted an interview with Steve Olechowski, co-founder of FeedBurner turned Google employee. The Q&A session ended with fifteen answers to frequently asked questions about the transition. Sadly, many of my questions have been left unanswered as of yet.

A very large percentage of the blogosphere uses FeedBurner to cache their feeds, so this topic is one to watch. The service fits well into their business, and should open up some interesting opportunities in the future, and quite possibly the widespread adoption of ads in RSS feeds.

Read the full Q&A at Mashable.com.

Transfer Your FeedBurner Feed

Jan 25, 2009 by Matt | Posted in Services and Tools One Comment

If you remember a couple years ago, way back in the summer of 2007, Google bought the venerable feed mirror and statistics company FeedBurner. The Big G has since been slowly migrating everyone’s accounts over to their own servers, moving away from the old FeedBurner ones.

Since Google’s acquisition of FeedBurner, Inc. on June 1, 2007, we have been moving the FeedBurner application to Google hardware, software, and data centers. This allows the application to scale and perform like most Google applications and integrate easily with other Google platforms. It also means more reliability in delivering your content, analytics, and monetization, as well as a more secure and consistent experience for your users.

In order to provide an integrated experience and to support the new features we have planned for our feed platform, as well as to improve security, it is necessary for logins to be handled via a Google Account.

Google has set a deadline for you to move your feed now. You have until February 28, 2009 to transfer your feeds. Pro Blog Design has a tutorial on how to do so.

Also, check out Google’s FAQ page for further information.

FeedDemon vs. MyNT

Jan 22, 2008 by Matt | Posted in General No Comments

As you probably know by now, the popular RSS reader FeedDemon is now free. The maker, NewsGator, has decided to start making money solely off their enterprise customers. So they decided to make FeedDemon available to anyone who wants it (don’t worry, it’s still in active development).

I decided to take this as an opportunity to compare “normal” feed readers with my own MyNT RSS reader. How? I kept a record of the amount of time it took to read my RSS feeds for a total of one week (using MyNT). Next, I repeated the test with FeedDemon. Here is a chart of the results: