FeedBurner: Display your stats using the API
Happy New Year! Marketing Technology finds and reports on the latest technology that will enable your business to effectively market to your audience, for acquisition or retention strategies. Subscribe now the Marketing Technology Blog RSS feed or to the Marketing Technology Email to have new content sent directly to your inbox. You'll also find my other business blog helpful, Social Media Domination.
Recently, I’ve been on a bender to clean up my site and remove all the odds and ends that take away from the theming, and most of all - don’t add to the visitor’s experience.
One of the items I removed was the Feedburner stat widget. I wanted to put my statistics up by my actual RSS button (see this article on how to implement my RSS badge), but make it look natural.
The first step was a little lazy, I didn’t want to recreate the wheel. I searched for a Feedburner stats plugin out there and found a great Feedburner API Wordpress Plugin by Eric Davis.
One minor edit to the plugin was that I wanted to add a thousands separator (”,”). Within the function FB_GetCirculation, I updated the echo statement to add the number formatting I needed:
echo number_format($circ);
Activate the plugin and the next step is to put the stats in your sidebar of your template:
Circulation: <?php FB_GetCirculation($dates = 'last_month'); ?> Subscribers
Next, I’d like to recreate this plugin with Clicky Web Analytics so I can also tout the visitors to my web site, not just the feed subscribers. As well, I think the Feedburner plugin should cache the result - no need in hitting the API all day like it is.
As for the stats above, I was able to easier embed Wordpress stats using the Wordpress Stats Helper Plugin.
I think your customization on the stats looks great! Thanks for sharing how you did it!
-Jon
Would like to see your feedburner stats on a Gauge as shown on dashboardzone.com ? we are working on a plugin that can do this. The benefit of this would be, you can set your goals and see how it progress daily by the moving pointer