Share your Twitter & RSS subscribers with PHP

Many modern web designs are taking full advantage of social media integration by sharing their user base with their audience. In this tutorial we will look at some examples of websites which are implementing this effectively, as well as showing you how to create your own subscriber feed quickly and easily using PHP.

Subscriber feeds are generally, but not always RSS and Twitter. There are many reasons for wanting to display your subscriber and follower count, some of these can include:

• Giving confidence to new users who are viewing the website for the first time.
• Encouraging users to follow and/or subscribe themselves.
• Giving faith to potential clients or advertisers viewing the site.

Sites that do it well

There are a number of very successful websites that already share their subscriber counts to great success.

Lee Munroe’s blog uses an understated font and icon set to give precedence to his blog, whilst maintaining a controlled and professional tone.

One extra pixel is a great example of using imagery and colours to integrate the statistics into its website without feeling overworked.

Smashing magazine has pretty much been at the forefront in embracing social media and subscription stats on its site. in new and informative means.

web designer dev combines its subscribers to display an overview of the subscriptions. another a smart way of informing users without information overload.

Display your own subscriber stats

You can display your own subscriber stats quickly and easily with these simple PHP functions. Firstly you will need to know your feedburner ID, if you are not sure what this is or where to find it, why not read a my PHP feedburner function tutorial for detailed instructions.

Both functions displayed below make use of API’s which enable you to quickly and easily access publicly available information.

<?php
/**
 * @name subscriber stats
 * @author Philip Beel
 * @description Display your feedburner and twitter stats anywhere on your page
**/
 function feedburner_stats($feed, $attribute) {
 if ( !$feed ) { echo('[No Feed]'); } //user must pass in their URI
 if ( !$attribute ) { echo('[No Attribute]'); }//user must pass in their attribute
 $xmlobj = simplexml_load_file("http://feedburner.google.com/api/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=".$feed);
 if($xmlobj) {    //check we got back a response
 echo($xmlobj->feed->entry->attributes()->$attribute);
 } else {
 echo("0"); //else fall back on a static value
 }
 }
 function twitter_stats($id) {
 if ( !$id ) { echo('[No Feed]'); } //user must pass in their username
 $xmltwitter = simplexml_load_file("http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/".$id.".xml");
 if($xmltwitter) {    //check we got back a response
 echo($xmltwitter->status->user->followers_count);
 } else {
 echo("0"); //else fall back on a static value
 }
 }
?>

As you can see the functions are not that dissimilar, I have broken them out into separate calls for the sake of this tutorial, but it would be simple to convert this into 1 single function call, with a set of params depending on what you wanted to pull out. I have added a simple catch to make sure something is returned, and in the eventuality that the API cannot be contacted, you can have a fallback, in this case 0, but you can change it to any static value you like.

When displaying the feed on your page, simply call the functions like so:

<ul>
 <li><a href="http://feeds.feedburner.com/co/VazT" title="feed"><?php feedburner_stats('co/VazT', 'circulation'); ?></a><br /> Subscribers</li>
 <li><a href="http://twitter.com/philipbeel" title="twitter"><?php twitter_stats('philipbeel'); ?></a><br /> Followers</li>
</ul>

This makes life much easier when you want to call only one value at a time, by simply making the function call where you want the stat to appear. Check out the full demo in action, or download the source code from the links below.

Im always looking to improve the code, so if you have any suggestions, or spot any bugs, please let me know. Happy coding!