Tag Archives: FeedBurner

Google Shuts Down FeedBurner API

Oct 31, 2012 by Matt | Posted in Services and Tools 4 Comments

Google announced the deprecation and closure of several of their APIs awhile back, notable ones including the Translate API, a few search APIs and the FeedBurner API. As of just a few days ago, the FeedBurner API has been shut down. Any application that requests subscriber information will fail to retrieve the data. This includes custom subscriber count widgets, iPhone apps like Ego, et cetera.

This raises questions about the future of FeedBurner. Is Google planning to shutter the service as well? Coupled with the recent discontinuation of AdSense for Feeds, things not looking too good. If they do end up phasing out FeedBurner, it will break a lot of feed URLs. I’m sure at least three quarters of the feeds in my RSS reader are hosted by FeedBurner. Some transparency would be nice.

How to Display a FeedBurner Average

Jul 23, 2010 by Matt | Posted in Blogging No Comments

Tired of ever-fluctuating FeedBurner counts being displayed on your blog? Why don’t you just display a weekly average? Cats Who Blog has a tutorial that shows you how you can retrieve the numbers via the FeedBurner API, average them, and display a rounded figure.

Why do the stats fluctuate in the first place? In addition to the occasional FeedBurner flakiness, the service measures the number of feed aggregators that have pinged the feed in a single day. Stats, of both RSS and website page views, tend to be lower on weekends than weekdays, for example.

How to get a more relevant Feedburner count [Cats Who Blog]

Getting RSS and Twitter Subscriber Counts in WordPress

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

Mac AppStorm Subscribe SectionI 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.