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. 🙂
Well, I transferred my feed to the is service, set up the plug in they recommended, but darn it, when I go to kevinprovance.com/feed, it doesn’t redirect to the feedpress.me URL. I set all the redirects in the plug in.
Hey Kevin, I just looked at your feed and the redirection looks fine. Let us know if you need anything.
Cheers,
Maxime VALETTE
FeedPress CEO