Most of you who have blogs/website might be aware of FeedBurner. Its a service which provides custom RSS Management tools like Analysing Web-Traffic, the number of readers subscribed to you blog etc. I too use Feedburner to help me keep track of my feeds and its readers. Although I love their service, I always found the FeedBurner Chicklet (It displays the number of readers subscribed to your RSS) to be a constraint, it isn`t that flexible i.e We can modify the color of the chicklet but not the chicklet it self. So I decided to create my own Chicklet to help me display the number of readers subscribed to my blog. (Although the number isn`t that big )

It Starts ! Feedburner API

Hmm..so where did I start…. Ahh ! The Feedburner API ofcourse. I wanted to know how to retrieve the number of Readers of a particular RSS feed as simple text.
http://code.google.com/apis/feedburner/awareness_api.html had the answer to my problem !

Current Basic Feed Awareness Data
https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=<feeduri>

where <feeduri> = your feedname i.e vmdtuts in my case

Sample Response
circulation – An approximate measure of the number of individuals for whom your feed has been requested in the 24 hour period described by date.

Thats what I was looking for !!. Now Since I have a way to access information about my RSS feeds, I had to think of a method to request the API url and retrieve the result using PHP (ofcourse).
Note : If you try to access the above URL with your feed address, you`ll see an XML output with all the relevant details about your feed !.

Thank You CURL – Here is the Code

We`ll use CURL to make a request to the above URL and retrieve the XML output.

$my_feed_url = "https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=yourfeedurl"; // yourfeedurl = vmdtuts in my case

$s_ch = curl_init(); //Initialize Curl
curl_setopt($s_ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);//Set curl to return the data instead of printing it to the browser.
curl_setopt($s_ch, CURLOPT_URL, $my_feed_url); //Set the URL
$data = curl_exec($s_ch); //Execute the fetch
curl_close($s_ch); //Close the connection
$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
$no_of_readers = $xml->feed->entry['circulation'];

echo $no_of_readers."Readers"; //Will display no of Readers

Voila There you have it. A Simple method to retrieve the number of readers who have subscribed to your RSS.

Tip : If you want to display the number of Readers in your WordPress Blog. Just open up sidebar.php and insert the code anywhere where you want to display the number of readers.