Why Limit Media

How to Fix WordPress Feedburner Plugins After Converting to Google Feedburner

I ran into (yet another) Feed Count + Feed­burner prob­lem recently, shortly after writ­ing my last arti­cle on account­ing for Feedburner’s sub­scriber count mis­takes. And since I heard from a few peo­ple who are also using the Feed Count plu­gin, I thought I should share this info.

The Back­story

As I’m sure all you Feed­burner users out there are well aware, Google pur­chased Feed­burner quite some time ago. But until recently, that didn’t mean much: the same peo­ple were work­ing on the code, your infor­ma­tion was stored in the same place and was rep­re­sented the same way, and so on.

But recently Google has begun bring­ing Feed­burner more fully into the fold. As a result, all Feed­burner users are being required to con­vert their Feed­burner accounts into Google accounts. That cre­ated quite a few headaches for lots of peo­ple (includ­ing myself) right off the bat, as it took a good week for Google to nail down my sub­scriber num­bers with any accu­racy – one day I would have thou­sands of sub­scribers, the next I might have zero, and the day fol­low­ing only a few hundred.

A New Problem

How­ever, even once Google started report­ing my Feed­burner num­bers cor­rectly, I still had a prob­lem: my Feed Count plu­gin no longer grabbed my sub­scrip­tion sta­tis­tics. Now, this wasn’t as huge a prob­lem as it could have been, because I had my jQuery Fee­burner fix in place… but I still wanted my real sub­scriber stats back at some point.

After a bit of dig­ging, I found the prob­lem: as part of their con­ver­sion from Feed­burner to “Google” Feed­burner, Google changed the loca­tion of their API. Thus, any plu­g­ins that used the old Feed­burner API ceased func­tion­ing once that user’s account was suc­cess­fully ported to Google.

The Solu­tion

Long-​​term, the best solu­tion would be for the plu­gin devel­op­ers to update and release new ver­sions of their plu­g­ins. But as of now, the Feed Count plu­gin has not been updated – and since it hasn’t seen an update since last July, I’m not going to hold my breath on a new ver­sion. So I decided to take mat­ters into my own hands and edit my copy of the Feed Count plugin.

Note: this solu­tion is spe­cific to the Feed Count plu­gin, but any brave souls out there could prob­a­bly mod­ify and use this infor­ma­tion to update other plu­g­ins as well.

I opened up my copy of the Feed Count plu­gin file (feedcount.php) and found this function:

function mapelli_fc_get_defaults() {
	return array(
			'map_fc_feedurl' => '',
		  'map_fc_queryurl' =>'http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=',
			'map_fc_lastcount' => 'N/A',
			'map_fc_lastupdate' => 0,
			'map_fc_updateinterval' => 60, // 1 h
	    'map_fc_error_updateinterval' => 5, // 5 min
		  );
}

This func­tion mostly sets all the plu­gin defaults, but it also sets the “queryurl” – the web­site that the plu­gin hits to find your sub­scriber count infor­ma­tion. This URL is not cus­tomiz­able any­where inside Word­Press, and since this URL has now changed, we’re forced to edit the plu­gin itself.

All I had to do was change the “map_​fc_​queryurl” line to read this instead:

'map_fc_queryurl' =>'https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=',

Then I saved the plu­gin, uploaded it to my server, and my stats started show­ing up again! How­ever, it’d still rec­om­mend putting some­thing like this JavaScript fix in place for those ran­dom times when Feed­burner drops the ball (and your sub­scriber count).

Note: Your stats prob­a­bly won’t start show­ing up again instantly. You’ll have to wait for the dura­tion of your “update inter­val,” which can be con­fig­ured in Word­Press under Set­tings -> Feed Count:

If you’re using a dif­fer­ent plu­gin and have run into this same prob­lem, please give this solu­tion a try and let peo­ple know in the com­ments if it worked. Thanks!