You, my fellow Filipino, are probably busy scooping out estero overspill inside your house, or are currently plodding through murky floods in Manila or elsewhere in the country. I share your devastation and your prayers.
So let me just make this FYI quick. I am shifting my RSS and e-mail subscription service provider from the good ol’ free service Feedburner to Feedblitz. I’ve always used Feedburner because for an un-techy person like me, it is easy peasy to use. But for the better part of 2012-2013, I have been incredibly frustrated with its service, too. Many bloggers, especially those in the US, share my sentiment. Word also has it that Google will be shutting down Feedburner soon.
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| We’ll soon be saying goodbye to this. |
It’s been especially disastrous these past few months: feed subscribers going from 100 to zero, or 84 to 50 then 84 again after two days, annoying warning signsall over my blog that made it look virus-ridden. Just this past week, it has completely stopped updating my feeds.
Both e-mail and RSS feeds aren’t showing any of my recent blog content. The last was the Sili at Gata Giveaway on the 15th. I have since published three posts – all of which has still not showed up despite pinging and resyncing the feeds…which is perhaps why my RSS readers are seesawing like mad. I mean, if a blog doesn’t update content, why the hell would anyone subscribe to its feeds in the first place?
Both e-mail and RSS feeds aren’t showing any of my recent blog content. The last was the Sili at Gata Giveaway on the 15th. I have since published three posts – all of which has still not showed up despite pinging and resyncing the feeds…which is perhaps why my RSS readers are seesawing like mad. I mean, if a blog doesn’t update content, why the hell would anyone subscribe to its feeds in the first place?
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| One of ’em glitches caused by Feedburner |
Worse, I cannot find my original feed source in Feedburner; I can see my feeds when I click on that blue Feedburner chicklet on the sidebar, butI cannot even log in to my Feedburner account and optimize/ publicize/ troubleshootize because it does not show me the original source! Sheesh.
I have no patience and more so the time to deal with these hassles. God knows how much blog entry and work I have already.
I care about readership. I may not know your e-mail addresses to offer newsletters to each of you, but I want you to get content that you want from this site on time, always. So despite reading on a few setbacks with Feedblitz, I am giving it a try. I don’t mind paying $1.49 a month so long as everybody gets the feeds they expect from the blog.
Also, there are a few glitches on the custom blog template I have been trying to fix for the longest time: that small irritating icon on the Filipina Explorer header and the photo slideshow’s going static, for instance. The template designer doesn’t answer my questions. A 3-column footer is also a long-time fancy, but since Blogger “upgraded” (Pfft) the blogger interface, the expand widget tickbox has been eliminated, so users can’r customize a 3-column footer and squeeze the code in the HTML. There are ways, I believe, but those are too complicated to understand for an non-tech, no-hard core coder like me. And there’s just too much clutter on my sidebar. Love the slideshow and the template, but I need this blog to be more streamlined and cleaner-looking.My only worry is that changing the template would again reset the Facebook likes per post. But quite well, something’s gotta give.
So. In the next few days, you’ll see a cleaner, simpler template with that lovely footer, plus transitioned feeds to Feedblitz. You don’t need to do anything. Feedblitz will do the work for you. You can receive and read feeds as usual. Please bare with occasional maintenance glitches as I renovate my home.
Sorry, that wasn’t quick at all.
