I replaced Feedburner’s subscriber count with this Bash script

I replaced Feedburner’s subscriber count with this Bash script →

September 25, 2012 ∞https://marco.org/2012/09/25/feedburner-counter-replacement

By many accounts, including my own experience, it looks like Feedburner is on its way out. (It may have quietly left already. We could just be looking at a cardboard cutout of Feedburner at its domain.)

I was only using it for the subscriber count,¹ since the number of hits to your RSS feed doesn’t accurately represent that, but that functionality has been returning 0 for about a week. So this morning, I removed the Feedburner 302 redirect, started serving my RSS feed directly, and wrote a shell script to scan the Apache log and give a reasonably accurate subscriber-count estimate. It’s returning almost identical counts (within 1%) to what Feedburner reported before it stopped working.

Here’s the script. I scheduled it with cron to run shortly after midnight each day, and it emails me the subscriber count.

The scariest part: over 90% of my feed’s subscribers use Google Reader. What happens when Google Reader dies?

If you’ve been using Feedburner’s click-tracking, which turns all of your post URLs into feedproxy redirects and shits those utm_ tracking variables all over your destination URLs, maybe this is a good excuse to cut that out. ↩︎

Marco.org