So your fed up with the over-used feedburner chicklet, we were as well so we went in hunt for alternatives, and here’s a couple of the best methods we found:

With PHP, this should work for any site using PHP and feedburner:

Place the following code in your template before where you want to display the count. This will get your feedcount from feedburner. Replace rss4real with the name of your feedburner feed.

//get cool feedburner count
$whaturl=”http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetFeedData?uri=rss4real”;

//Initialize the Curl session
$ch = curl_init();

//Set curl to return the data instead of printing it to the browser.
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
//Set the URL
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $whaturl);
//Execute the fetch
$data = curl_exec($ch);
//Close the connection
curl_close($ch);

$xml = new SimpleXMLElement($data);
$fb = $xml->feed->entry['circulation'];

//end get cool feedburner count
?>
Now we’ve got your feedcount in a variable called $fb. Wherever you want to output your feedcount simply drop in the following code:

This method is by 45n5.com.

Another way the lazy-ish way is the feed count plugin by: mapelli for WordPress users. It’s easy to install and easy to customise with CSS, viewthe link for full details.

Ok now you know how to display your feedcount with plain text, you might want to add an rss icon near it. Here are some good resources:

Feed Icons
Glass Style Icons
3D RSS Icons
Circle RSS Icons
Nyssa Brown 3D RSS Icon Pack

If you know of any better methods, or other RSS Icon resources worthy of mention, let us know in the comments.