Solve FeedBurner Count Drop, Fluctuating Feed Count Problem

You have been using feed burner for some time you may have noticed that the feedburner feed count fluctuates and in many days it shows less number of readers on your feedburner count.

No, one still has a valid explanation to why this happens although there are assumptions that the feed count drop happens when a type of subscription is not counted for eg: desktop feed readers like feeddemon or feed notifier etc.

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

How to Fix FeedBurner Count Drop Problem

The solution is to show the average number of reader count fpr 7 days your feed count. But note, this will display as text and not the default image widget like .

Step 1 : Open Dashboard > Appearance > Editor > functions.php

Step 2 : Add the following function to your functions file. Make sure not to leave any whitespaces.

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);
}

Step 3 : Use the following code in your theme files to display the average feed count.

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

Note : Replace Realtrix with your Feed ID.

Hope you find this useful….

Also See : Subscribe Facebook Notifications: Generate RSS Feed of Notifications

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