Dear Musings from Me Subscribers:
The title of this post may give a hint to my mental state. I’m unhinged. Unglued. Discombobulated. Not always, but today is becoming…a day. I’ve mentioned before that I am not a techie. In fact if a room was divided in to zones, with techies in one corner of the room…I would be way over on the other side of the room…practically outside the room. Possibly with one toe hovering just above the threshold, but that’s it.
Over the last 4 years (Have I really blogged for 4 year!?!) I have learned more than I give myself credit for. I’m certainly not completely clueless about technology, internet, and social media. In fact once I “get” something it sticks. I remember the first time I heard about cloud computing. I was talking to a rep about netbooks without harddrives and all of a sudden I undersood what he was saying. And I mean I could explain it to others. I didn’t just have a vague, fleeting notion of what it was, I actually knew what cloud computing was.
But back to my tech woes…if you’re a blogger you will have heard that Feedburner is kaput. What is Feedburner? Well, this is in the category of “fuzzy” for me. I’m not sure how to explain. Here goes…Feedburner is an rss service. If you subscribed to this blog, you subscribed using Feedburner or another rss. By subscribing you get email reminders whenever I post. I know that a bunch of you click over lickety split when I post a giveaway. I love that you love the giveaways that I post on this blog. Makes my heart feel all warm and fuzzy…you know the good type of fuzzy…not the fuzzy that means I don’t understand something.
I have the Feedburner stat counter on my blog telling everyone how many subscribers I have. I manage my subscribers through Feedburner, which is to say that I actually didn’t do much with Feedburner until today. I left it alone.
But back to yesterday, I didn’t notice that the Feedburner counter said 0. Apparently the counter has shown 0 subscribers for a few days. As I said, I am clueless. So, bottom line is that Google is no longer supporting Feedburner, which means that I had to scramble to find all my subscribers. We’re not talking thousands, but I treasure and value everyone of you. I don’t want to lose a single subscriber. I now have a portion of my subscribers stored at my email subscription service…MailChimp and Feedblitz. There’s still a bunch unaccounted for. And of course, I want to keep everyone up to speed. I will track down every last one…just need to do a little digging. Oh the fuzziness!
Today I am getting a crash course in Feedburner, Feedblitz, MailChimp, rss, email subscription services. Oh my. I know enough to know that I was able to transfer some of my subscribers with only minor wailing and gnashing of teeth. The other set of subscribers is unaccounted for. Let’s just say that I am hoping to pull them out of the fuzzy fog very soon. *Waving Hi…Can You See Me?? I’m Coming To Get You!!
So now that I am using this new rss service — Feedblitz — I need to give you a headsup. In fact the good folks at Feedblitz told me to let you know, so that you wouldn’t be shocked to see anything different around these parts.
Here’s the 411 on Feedburner’s demise and my transition to Feedblitz from the folks at Feedblitz:
From Feedblitz: We strongly recommend that you use your existing email service to advise your subscribers of the change you are about to make – this avoids surprising them. Otherwise, it is very possible that they may regard your messages (powered by us) as unsolicited, and unsubscribe. <<Eeek, I don’t want to lose any of you, so hang on through his transition!
As part of your message to your existing subscribers, please advise them to:
- Add feedblitz@mail.feedblitz.com to their address books or email whitelists immediately.
- Only unsubscribe using the links we provide in each email, and not their ISP’s spam or abuse buttons.
- Look out for the message from FeedBlitz advising them that the change has taken place.
So without further ado I bid farewell to Feedburner and say a hearty hello to Feedblitz. And I spent so much time on Feedblitz this morning trying not to destroy my blog that I signed up for the Feedblitz Affiliate Program. If you are a blogger, I’d suggest joining too! Click on the link below to sign up.
