I screwed up royally. With just one click of the button, I deleted my blog’s Feedburner feed, and with it, all of the established RSS and Email subscriptions.
Over the past three years, I’ve gotten such a thrill out of seeing the blog readership grow, knowing that there were real, live people who enjoyed www.OnLivingByLearning.com as much as I did. I LOVE that there are readers who liked the blog well enough to sign up to receive every article as soon as it was published. I can’t tell you how gratifying it is to have numerical proof that my “hobby” was of value to others.
I certainly didn’t mean to get rid of my readers, but Feedburner is tricky to use. Part of the Google monolith, there is no human support to help when you’re trying to do something unusual, such as changing the blog’s name to www.TheJourneyMom.com. I took a risk, thinking that I could use the feed delete and redirect feature to do the transfer, but I lost that gamble. Now, Feedburner has that feed locked up for 30 days, without any way for me to get into the back end. After that, it’ll just be gone.
Without the feed, I’m very limited in what I can do with the blog. I can post articles, but who is going to see them? No one will be getting content via email or their RSS reader. And, I can’t even properly set up the blog’s Facebook page. A blog isn’t as much fun if no one is reading it, and a blog can’t be developed into a business if you can’t provide stats to show that it has a readership.
Subscribers are the lifeblood of blogs, but perhaps this was a blessing in disguise.
I love Feedburner, and the Feedburner price tag (FREE), but you get what you pay for. I can’t tell you how many times I freaked because my subscribers suddenly disappeared on Feedburner, for no apparent reason. But I would’ve continued to ignore these hiccups, if I hadn’t grown so frustrated today because there is no human support to turn to when you have a feed emergency.
Eventually, I realized that I could fix my Feedburner problems by also deleting the tracking codes on the blog, and then starting over. However, in the meantime, I had explored alternatives, and discovered FeedBlitz, a service that does everything that Feedburner did, and much, much more. In addition to customized RSS feed options, I can improve the email subscriptions to provide more content. I’m not even sure what all the available features are, but there is one huge item that makes all the difference.
On FeedBlitz, I was able to get a response to my support question within a couple of hours, saving me a ton of stress and worry. That’s priceless.
Now, I’ve got new subscription buttons, yay, and I hope I can persuade you to subscribe to The Journey Mom so you won’t miss a single super exciting post.
Get The Journey Mom by Email or put it on your RSS Feed Reader, or both. Please.
{ 9 comments… read them below or add one }
I’ll subscribe…cuz I’m nice like that, and I like what you have to say.
Blogging Goddess´s last [type] ..The Talk
Thanks, you ARE a Goddess!
If it’s any conslation, I didn’t get unsubbed! I still got this post in Reader just like any other. But, it’s probably I subbed directly to the actual rss feed, I never use feedburner type feeds. I bet a lot of your readers have done the same! I’m sure you’ll get everyone back. Good luck!
This post showed up on my reader, too, but I also always subscribe directly rather than through the button links.
I think it’s neat you are re-creating your blog and I look forward to seeing what you’ll do!
Tatiana´s last [type] ..Abraham Lincoln
Sarah & Tatiana, It’s such a relief to hear that you received this post in your readers, thank you so much for letting me know!
Feedburner is still feeding, but who knows for how long! I subbed under your new Feedblitz and unsubbed from Feedburner. I don’t want to miss your blog!
hey, Sandra! the new blog looks great. Love the new url, very catchy!
I’ll be in touch about the guest post, thanks so much for volunteering. I love upstate NY, but I rarely get there.
I guess that I will have to read through your blog… sounds interesting. I stumbled across it thanks to our friends at Zemanta since I was writing a post about my missing feedburner widget. But, now I guess that I need to look at feedblitz.
Doug Francis´s last [type] ..My Feedburner Burned Out
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