But recently Feedburner has not been behaving. We have one client whose feed consistently showed a page that said something like “Kraaak bork, your Feedburner feed is not working,” a stressful site to say the least for a guy who wants to make sure his feed subscribers are getting his content. Many people have been complaining about problems with Feedburner in the last while: ReadWriteWeb reported that Feedburner was slow on pinging feeds, and over here at WordPress Garage I had the pleasure of watching our readers plunge from 1030 to 380. The next day the number went back up, and I can’t imagine it’s because 700 of you unsubscribed and then regretted your decision and resubscribed.

(And may I just take this opportunity to thank all our subscribers for sticking with us. We love you. You rock.)

Anyways, this situation is yet another example of the scariness of a) The Google monopoly (Google bought Feedburner) and b) The problem with allowing services to “own” your content. This is similar to the problem with hosting your blog on WordPress.com, which I’ve discussed here in the past. In the case of Feedburner, your are at their mercy if they have trouble with the service, or if for some reason they decide to cancel your account, in which case  you lose all your preciously collected subscribers.

So…the question is: is there an alternative to Feedburner? After doing a bit of searching, I found the following alternative ways for measuring feed subscribers:

1. Check how many people are subscribed to your blog on feed reader services that offer these types of stats, like Bloglines and Google Reader. See this post for instructions on how to see the number of subscribers on each service. This solutions would allow you to see general trends, like if the number of subscribers is going up or down, and you could even calculate percentage growth or decline. However, you would not get a good indication of the total number of subscribers on all feed readers.
2. (The following methods were all described on this post on the Free Marketing Zone.) Access logs: Use server logs to track how many times your feed page was accessed. This apparently does not give accurate results.
3. Images: Put a 1px by 1px image in your feed, which will be accessed every time your feed is opened in a reader. However, this only tells you how many people are reading your RSS, not how many are subscribed.
4. RSS Buttons: track the number of clicks of your image button that leads to an RSS feed. This is also not accurate since some people may just click and then not subscribe, and many people subscribe to an RSS feed without clicking on a button on your site; they use the RSS access in their browsers address bar, or simply enter your site’s URL in their feed reader, and the reader detects the URL automatically.
5. Tracking URL: Create a unique URL for every click to access the feed, so that whenever a person clicks the button, a unique URL is assigned, like the following: http://domain.com/feed.xml?uniqueurl_countvisitors. But I don’t know about that option – it sounds a bit much to create so many new URLs for a site.

As you can see, these options are ok, but not great. So if anyone knows of another service that provides feed subscription stat services, please let us know. And if there isn’t another option, please can someone create one? It would do all of us a great service.

And then a revelation – Blue Anvil explains how WordPress has RSS fetching capabilities built in. You can call an RSS feed with one of two functions:

1. fetch_rss
2. wp_rss

See Blue Anvil’s explanation of how these functions work>>
See the WordPress codex entries on wp_rss and fetch rss>>

I have diligently installed orderedlist’s FeedBurner Plugin in all blogs I have created so that we can all monitor our feed subscribers with FeedBurner. For some reason today, while I was looking at my FeedBurner stats, something didn’t seem quite right. I realized that I had never tested out autodiscovery on my feed.

So I did a test. I opened up Netvibes and entered the URL of my blogs to see what the autodiscovery picks up. Guess what – the WordPress default feeds were detected, not FeedBurner! Now I actually don’t know if this makes a difference, but one of FeedBurner’s forums has directions for making sure that the autodiscovery picks up the FeedBurner feed, which involves hacking your header.php file.

Do you have to make these changes to ensure that all feeds are redirected through FeedBurner? I don’t know. But I made the changes, and now when I did an autodiscovery test, it only picked up the FeedBurner feed.

So here are the changes you need to make:

1. Look in your header.php file for code that looks like this:
   <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS 2.0" href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" />
   You may find two or three code bits that are listed one after the other that resemble the above. Each one is dedicated to a different type of feed, like RSS 2.0, RSS .92, and Atom.
2. Your code may have something else in between the quotation marks after href. Whatever appears in those quotation marks, which in this case is <?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>, replace with the link to your FeedBurner feed. So for example, for this site, we would enter http://feeds.feedburner.com/WordpressGarage.
3. Save and upload the file.

Now autodiscovery will only find your FeedBurner feed link.

FeedBurner Plugin v2.2