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Want a cool custom feed count image like the one above? Check out Conflagration!

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Conflagration

Conflagration is a free, open-source PHP script to compliment the FeedBurner web feed handling service. (Neither Conflagration nor its author are officially affiliated with FeedBurner.) It connects with FeedBurner via the Awareness API. With Conflagration, you can do some cool things with your feed count, or the number of subscribers that your web feed has, that go beyond the tools that FeedBurner themselves offer to non-programmers. With Conflagration, you can:

Add the feed count of two or more feeds together. This is handy if you offer more than one version of your web feed (say, an RSS 2.0 version and an Atom version) and want to show off your total subscribers for both.

Display the total count as text instead of as an image, for those who love making low-bandwidth sites. Or conversely, you can…

Create a totally customized and unique feed count image. Conflagration can output your feed count as an image just like FeedBurner themselves do; however, Conflagration allows you to create and share fully-customizable "themes" to give your feed count image a totally unique look. Conflagration comes with three themes included in the download; here's what they look like.

"BigTimeSkyBlue" theme. Also comes in pink, green and gray, and is easily modifiable with an image editor.

"RayGunRobot" theme. In use on this web site.

"Tilted" theme. Still needs a little work…

This script should still be considered in beta stage and may contain the occasional bug. However, at least one other prominent blogger, Andy Beard, is using Conflagration successfully. Please contact me with any bugs you may find.

Requirements

To use Conflagration, you will need to have your own web server or shared hosting account; sorry, Blogspot/Livejournal users. Your server should support PHP 4.4 or greater; Conflagration will likely work with earlier versions of PHP, but this has not been tested. (Almost all shared hosting accounts will support this.) And, of course, you will need to have a FeedBurner account and at least one "burned" feed. Conflagration does not need a database.

Lemme download this thing already

Download Conflagration version 1.0 Beta 4

Beta 4 has some major differences with Beta 3; most notably, the configuration information is now stored in config.php instead of img.php. However, when upgrading, you should be able to copy over the info from your old img.php to config.php with no problems.

Installation instructions

If you've ever installed a script on your web server before (such as your blog script), you shouldn't have too much trouble with Conflagration's installation.

1. Log in to your FeedBurner account. Click on the feed you want to use with Conflagration. Click the "Publicize" tab, then click "Awareness API" in the menu on the left. Activate this feature, if it is not already active. Trying to use Conflagration with feeds for which the Awareness API is not enabled simply won't work. Repeat this process with each feed you wish to use with Conflagration.
2. Download the Conflagration archive and extract it on to your web server.
3. Make the Data directory writable by the web server program. Usually you can do this by doing a chmod 755 Data command if you're logged in to your server via SSH or a command-line FTP client.
4. Open Config.php in a text editor. This is where we'll configure Conflagration. The configuration code is written in the YAML markup language, which is simple enough to figure out even if you've never heard of it before. The commented lines in the file (prepended by the # character) will tell you what each setting does – it all should be pretty self-explanatory. Note that the latter half of the configuration file can be ignored if you are not going to use Conflagration to create an image with your feed count (you just want Conflagration to display your feed counts as text). Save the file when you're done.

What to do next will depend on how you want to display your feed count.

Displaying your feed count as an image

After saving the config.php file, open up the img.php file in your web browser. If all goes well, you should see an image displaying your feed count; otherwise, you should see some text describing errors that occurred and hopefully helping you fix them. If you want to change things in your config.php file - to add another feed ID to count, or to see how a different theme will look, for example - please note that you'll have to delete the cached feed count image before you see the changes. This will be in the Data directory and be named either img.png or img.jpeg. Only after deleting this image and reloading img.php will you see your changes take effect.

Displaying your feed count as text - the easy way

After saving the config.php file, open up the js.php file in your web browser. If all goes well, you should see something like this:

document.write("123");

If there were problems, you'll see some text describing the errors and hopefully helping you fix them. To get this count onto your web pages, you're going to use a <script> tag like this:

My blog has <script type="text/javascript" src="http://domain.xyz/Conflagration/js.php"></script> happy readers!

Assuming your site visitors are using web browsers that support JavaScript, this will display in their browsers like this:

My blog has 123 happy readers!

If you want to change things in your config.php file - to add another feed ID to count, for example - please note that you'll have to delete the cached feed count data before you'll see the changes. This will be in the Data directory, with the name count.text. Only after deleting this file and reloading the page will you see your changes take effect.

Displaying your feed count as text - the nerdier way

After saving the config.php file, open up the text.php file in your web browser. If all goes well, you should see nothing more than your feed count as plain text on the page; otherwise, you should see some text describing errors that occurred and hopefully helping you fix them.

If your blog is using "templates" which are really just PHP files - WordPress is guilty of this - you can embed your feed count into your template by doing something like this:

My blog has <?php require("/path/to/Configuration/text.php"); ?> happy readers!

If you want to change things in your config.php file - to add another feed ID to count, for example - please note that you'll have to delete the cached feed count data before you'll see the changes. This will be in the Data directory, with the name count.text. Only after deleting this file and reloading the page will you see your changes take effect.

Theme creation and testing instructions

…are on this page: Conflagration theme creation!

Licensing & credit where it's due

Conflagration contains various open source and public domain files, being redistributed under the following licenses.

• The SPYC YAML parser (spyc.php) was created by Chris Wansthrath and is under the MIT License.
• The Tuffy fonts were created by Thatcher Ulrich and are in the public domain.
• The Times New Rhombus font was created by (anonymous?) and is in the public domain.
• The feed icon was created by Matt Brett et al and (is in the public domain?).

All other code and artwork was created by myself, Garrett Albright, and is hereby released into the public domain.

Version History

Version 1.0 Beta 1 (11 April 2007): Initial release.

Version 1.0 Beta 2 (13 April 2007): Tweaked the testing features; added the Count flag.

Version 1.0 Beta 3 (26 May 2007): Again improved testing features; tweaked the RayGunRobot theme to better fit four-digit numbers; remade the Tilted theme to fix the un-anti-aliased edges of the feed icon; added BigTime themes; removed Config.yaml and integrated it into img.php for security reasons.

Version 1.0 Beta 4 (7 July 2007): Added text and JavaScript modes; moved the configuration back out into an external file (config.php).