Switching From Feedburner To URI.LV

Google’s Feedburner service has long been heralded as one of the best ways for websites to distribute RSS feeds. Users can monitor, publicize, and distribute their feeds through a variety of ways… all for the price of free. However, Google has made a few unnerving moves in the world of syndication. First, the search giant axed Feedburner’s API in October 2012. Next, they announced that Google Reader, a popular content aggregator, will be shutdown this summer. Some, including me, speculate this consolidation to be in preparation for Google+ to take on a larger role as a digital hub for sharing information. Until that happens, the rest of us have to prepare for the worst by looking for alternatives to Feedburner.

I stumbled on URI.LV, a service which allows users to perform many of Feedburner’s tasks through a much more modern user interface. URI.LV is especially tailored to help Feedburner users transition over; it literally took me five minutes to get everything up and running. 🙂 I surmise that in the coming months, URI.LV will continue to be refined with new features making the memory of Google Feedburner a thing of the past. Be sure to check it out, and let me know how it goes.

Addendum 4/9/13: If you’re a WordPress user, here’s a shortcode snippet (paste it in your theme’s functions.php file) to display the number of subscribers you have on your URI.LV feed. You’ll need to change the “FEED-NAME” entry to the feed’s alias (found under Admin -> Settings -> Your feed).

function rssCountFunc()
{ 
return json_decode(file_get_contents("https://static.uri.lv/stats/FEED-NAME.js"),true)[subscribers]; 
}
add_shortcode('rssSubscriberCount','rssCountFunc');

Now simply use “[rssSubscriberCount]” in pages/posts to display your subscriber count. 🙂