So you don’t want to use that ugly feedburner chicklet to show off your RSS subscribers on your Wordpress blog? Neither did we. It really would do a number on your beautifully crafted design, wouldn’t it? Well, there is good news. You no longer have to use that chicklet. Thanks to the Awareness API that lets you have access to the information about your feed using your own coding.  But don’t get scared if your not into hard coding your own solution. There are a few plugins you can choose from.

I prefer using the Feedburner Circulation plugin by Derek Herman. Why is this one better than the others out there? I like this one because it reduces the API calls by only executing once an hour. It won’t slow down your blog by trying to update every time you refresh a page. It returns a database stored Feedburner circulation count in simple text format.

Also, another great aspect of this plugin is that if the Feedburner API is down, the plugin will not throw xml errors when the http_code is something other than 200.

Important: you have to transfer your feed over to google, which uses feedproxy.google.com/feed-id. To figure out if you are already using it copy and paste that url into your browser and replace “feed-id” with your feed id. If you are not using google feedproxy then follow these instructions  on How to move from Feedburner.com to Google Feedproxy.

Getting Started

1. Download the plugin from the wordpress site.
2. Upload the feedburner-circulation folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory
3. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
4. Place this function in to your theme files wherever you want your number to show up. <?php feedburner_circulation_text('feed_id'); ?>
5. Replace the “feed_id” with your feed id
6. Login to your Google Feedburner account via feedburner.google.com/
7. Click on the feed you want to use.
8. Click on the “Publicize” tab
9. Click on “Awareness API”
10. Click “Enable”

You are now done!

Now you can style and manipulate that feed count to your heart’s content.

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