All credit for this goes to hongkiat.com, I’m simply re-posting because I find this to be extremely useful, and like to note stuff like this on my own blog.

Although recognizable, the Feedburner chicklet that displays the number of subscribers is ehh.  I’d much rather be able to stylize the number itself and fit it into my own design.  Wouldn’t it be nice if you can pull the number out of the chicklet and do whatever you want?  You can, and it’s extremely easy!  You can see I just implemented this on the sidebar on Carbon Fiber Gear:

Of course that number can be styled however you want it using CSS.  So how do you get it?  Simply put this code somewhere in your Wordpress template (Mine is in sidebar.php), and make sure to replace the “feedburnerid” with your ID in the $whaturl line:

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25

<?
	//get cool feedburner count
	$whaturl="http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=feedburnerid";
 
	//Initialize the Curl session
	$ch = curl_init();
 
	//Set curl to return the data instead of printing it to the browser.
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
 
	//Set the URL
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $whaturl);
 
	//Execute the fetch
	$data = curl_exec($ch);
 
	//Close the connection
	curl_close($ch);
	$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
	$fb = $xml->feed->entry['circulation'];
	//end get cool feedburner count
 
	// Use $fb to print out the number of subscribers
	echo 'Join the <i>' . $fb . '</i> subscribers';
?>

You’ll need to make sure the feed count service is activated. To do that, login to your Feedburner account, hit the “Publicize” tab, and then go to to Feed Count. On this page you’ll need to activate the service. There you have it!

I found an excellent tool provided by Feedburner if your feed is run through them. It’s called FeedFlare, and if you don’t already have it activated, get on it! FeedFlare is the feature on the bottom of each RSS feed post that shows you important links such as “E-mail this * Add A Comment * Digg This, etc”.

I’ve seen it on other blogs before, but I just started to look for how to add myself tonight. Login to your Feedburner admin and click on the optimize tab. On the left you’ll see the FeedFlare option on the menu. Once you click that you’ll see all of the options for the different “FeedFlares” you can have. I added the 4 above for now, as you don’t want to have too much that it overbears the reader. If you don’t see something you want, you can browse the catalog for more, or even develop your own using their API.

Something that takes just a few seconds to add can drastically improve your blog, increase interactivity with your readers, and bring in new traffic.