Ever since Google took over feedburner it’s gone… well… a little downhill. Although TutShelf still uses Feedburner there are certainly some things that get me. For a period – whilst I was still developing the first instance of TutShelf, I created my own system which was very close to Feedburner. Throughout this tutorial I will go though how to build such a system as well as put in the odd tip here and there.

The main things we will be focusing on making are:

• RSS Readers page, with links to XML and Email
• Email subscription
• Easy to read Stats

RSS

The first obsticle I had was the rss links page, Feedburner uses something like this:

I designed my own page, similar to this and here’s what it looks like:

I used the default Wordpress RSS 2.0 feed and the SimplePie Wordpress plugin. If anyone’s struggling on figuring out Simple Pie check out CSS-Tricks’ great video tutorial!.

You will do well to get some icons for the services you wish to cater for, although you could use text links. I designed my own icons, but you can get others off various sites. Once you’ve done that use these little snippets to link to the various readers.

Google

<a href="http://fusion.google.com/add?feedurl=<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>"><img src="path to your rss icons" /></a>

Yahoo

<a href="http://add.my.yahoo.com/rss?url=<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>"><img src="path to your rss icons" /></a>

AOL

<a href="http://feeds.my.aol.com/add.jsp?url=<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>"><img src="path to your rss icons" /></a>

Newsgator

<a href="http://www.newsgator.com/ngs/subscriber/subext.aspx?url=<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>"><img src="path to your rss icons" /></a>

Netvibes

<a href="http://www.netvibes.com/subscribe.php?url=<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>"><img src="path to your rss icons" /></a>

After that it’s time for a nice slice of SimplePie. (excuse the pun ^_^) To do this on a wordpress page you need to download and install the Exec-PHP plugin, this will allow you to use PHP on Wordpress pages. Then just insert this:

<?php echo SimplePieWP('http://yoursite.com'); ?>

Obviously replacing ‘yoursite.com’ with your domain.

That’s the RSS page done, now let’s move onto something more trivial, which is email.

Email

Unfortunately Wordpress doesn’t have this installed by default but we can add that function though a great plugin: Subscribe2. Again, download and install and just insert this into a normal wordpress page:

<!--subscribe2-->

Don’t worry too much about stats, it has them built in so you can see them, however they won’t be amalgamated into the other RSS stats (which is the only downside to this).

If your not a fan of Subscribe2 then perhaps MailChip or something of the like would appeal to you.

Last but not least is stats, this is to me, the most important.

Stats

I’ve always been a Mint fan, it has many useful plugins, one being the Bird Feeder Pluginfor Wordpress. The bird feeder plugin tracks your RSS subscribers, just like that of Feedburner. And of course I wouldn’t leave you guys with out an alternative so if your tight on cash then give Feedstats a go.

So that’s it! I hope this tutorial has helped anyone who wants an alternative to feedburner or just looking to learn new things. If you enjoyed this post we’d really appreciate some link love and some feedback by commenting below and submitting this post to social networks.

Thanks for reading! :D