Arkitect Design.

Code: Subscriber Count

If you follow me on twitter, you might have saw me mention earlier today that I was working on a really nerdy blog post. In an effort to post a little more, I decided that I should share a simple PHP function I wrote today so that maybe someone can get some use out of it. You can use this function on your website to consolidate your follower counts into a single number that you can then style and display. Right now, it supports Feedburner (most blogs RSS feed provider. If you aren’t using it, I’d suggest it.), a Facebook Fan Page and a Twitter account. You can mix and match out of the three if you don’t use all three services.

Another thing worth mentioning is that when you’re pulling data from other servers, especially with how popular Facebook and Twitter are, it could potentially make your site stop rendering the page at the number while it’s waiting for the results. This function caches your follower count (which you can turn off) into a text file so that any page loads for the rest of the day won’t have to queue up all three additional servers.

If you are running a WordPress site, just pop the function into your themes functions.php file. The cache text file will be saved into your theme folder. If not, it will be saved to the root directory of your site.

Here’s the function:

////////////////////////////
/*
Function: Subscriber Count

$feedburner is the custom extension of the feedburner url. http://feeds2.feedburner.com/XXXXXXXXX
$facebook is the extension of your Facebook Fan page. http://www.facebook.com/XXXXXXXXX
$twitter is your Twitter username. http://www.twitter.com/XXXXXXXXX

*/

function subscriberCount( $feedburner, $twitter, $facebook, $cache = true ) {
	$count = 0;

	if( $cache == true ) :
		$interval = 24 * 60 * 60; // 24 hr
		if( function_exists( 'get_bloginfo' ) ) :
			$cache_path = TEMPLATEPATH;
		else :
			$cache_path = $_SERVER['DOCUMENT_ROOT'];
		endif;
		$cache_path .= '/subscriber_count.txt';

		if( file_exists( $cache_path ) && ( time() - $interval ) < filemtime( $cache_path ) ) :
			$file = file_get_contents( $cache_path );
			if( !empty( $file ) ) :
				return number_format( strval( $file ) );
			endif;
		endif;
	endif;

	if( $feedburner ) :
		$xml = simplexml_load_file('https://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri='.$feedburner);
		$count += strval( $xml->feed->entry['circulation'] );
	endif;

	if( $facebook ) :
		$api_page = 'https://graph.facebook.com/' . $facebook;
		$json = file_get_contents ( $api_page );

		$profile = json_decode( $json );
		$count += strval( $profile->fan_count );
	endif;

	if( $twitter ) :
		$api_page = 'http://twitter.com/users/show/' . $twitter;
		$xml = file_get_contents( $api_page );

		$profile = new SimpleXMLElement( $xml );
		$count += strval( $profile->followers_count );
	endif;

	if( $cache == true ) :
		file_put_contents( $cache_path, $count);
	endif;

	return number_format( $count );
}

To use it, just run this function wherever you want the text to be displayed:

<p>I Have <?=subscriberCount('arkitectdesign', 'mattfelten', '')?> Subscribers!</p>

As you can see, I’m using my Feedburner account and my Twitter account. I don’t have a Facebook Fan Page so I left it blank.

Leave me a comment if you find this useful at all. I’d love to see if it was used somewhere.

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