This post is rather outdated now, and so the details contained within are no longer valid. Read with caution.
I recently came across the rather snazzy looking subscriber count button on the Smashing Magazine website. A quick Google revealed that these are no longer available after MailChimp redesigned their service. Boo!
An example of the Smashing Magazine counter:
So, a quick look through the coding on this Smashing Magazine page revealed the following:
<script type="text/javascript" language="JavaScript" src="http://smashingmagazine.us1.list-manage1.com/subscriber-count?b=34&u=e768e688-36c3-4c2d-88fa-982d9d3f254b&id=a1666656e0"></script>
Note how this script simply relies on the user knowing the correct information for the various parameters. This means we can go and find out what our ’list-manage.com’ datacenter is, our ‘u’ ID number is, and finally our ‘ID’ number.
How to
Log into your MailChimp account and select the list you wish to use for your subscriber count button. Select Signup Forms then Embedded, so that we can reveal the code used to make a signup form specifically for the selected list.
Select the Naked option, and you should see code similar to the following:
<!-- Begin MailChimp Signup Form -->
<div id="mc_embed_signup">
<form action="http://YOUR-USERNAME-HERE.YOUR-DC.list-manage.com/subscribe/post?u=YOUR-U-NUMBER&id=YOUR-ID-NUMBER" method="post" id="mc-embedded-subscribe-form" name="mc-embedded-subscribe-form" class="validate" target="_blank" novalidate>
So we simply replace these details with those in the code above, and we get your very own Subscriber Count Button!
Tada!
Customisation
That’s brilliant and all, but what if I don’t like orange!? Simple, change the b number after ‘subscriber-count?’.
There are 40 options to choose from, and examples of these can be seen here.