Announcement for RSS Subscribers: Switching Subscription Service

I am going to be switching services for RSS and content update notifications. Up until now, I’ve been using feedburner, which is a free service that has been around since I believe 2004 or so and was bought out by google in 2007. Since that acquisition, its best feature is that it is free. This is offset somewhat by pretty flaky statistics of subscriber counts and occasional burps in performance and function. However, a big drawback is that it seems as though google might kill the service. Making matters worse is the fact that google has done exactly nothing to illuminate the issue one way or the other, playing it close to the vest. “Don’t be evil, but you can be a little shady if you want.”

Other bloggers seem to be doing the same and a feedburner bug starting yesterday telling all users that we’ve lost all of our subscribers is turning the trickle of departing feedburner users into an exodus. Well one of my philosophies in life is that I like to depend as little as possible on other people and things, especially shady people and things. So, I am going to be hopping on that bandwagon and switching to FeedBlitz effective today or tomorrow (allowing enough time for this one last post to be sent out via feedburner). The good news is that this new service apparently allows readers to subscribe to posts through other media, such as receiving a tweet or a facebook/google-plus post rather than the traditional email or RSS notification. Progress and all that.

I have already created my FeedBlitz account and the migration guide from feedburner to this new service assures me that not one subscription will be interrupted… but, if your subscription is interrupted, that’s why. I intend to have a post Sunday night or Monday morning and if you don’t see something by then and want to continue reading, you may need to resubscribe through your RSS reader. Thanks for reading and for your patience!

Update: If you are subscribed directly to the Feedburner URL for the blog or for comments, please re-subscribe using the buttons on the right. These will automatically redirect you to the new, current FeedBlitz feed and you can delete your old subscription. If you are subscribed through my site directly, you need not do anything. Feel free to email/comment if you aren’t sure.

Behind the Scenes Feed Magic

Very quickly, I just installed a plugin to consolidate subscription through my feedburner account. Basically, my feedburner account will become aware of all subscribers now, including those who simply access daedtech.com/feed or those who use the subscription buttons on the left. As I understand it, this should have no effect on subscriptions whatsoever. Nonetheless, if it does — if anyone finds they’re having trouble with the feeds — please leave a comment and I’ll look into it.

Thanks, and thanks for reading!

Announcing Disqus for DaedTech

I just wanted to post a note to say that I’m switching from the default WordPress commenting system to using Disqus. So, if you’ve made comments in the past and don’t see them now, that’s because Disqus is in the process of importing all non-Disqus comments stored on my server. Hopefully comments will re-appear at some point in the next day or so.

If you have any problems with the new system, please feel free to email me or to post a comment here.

Thanks!

DaedTech on Social Media

DaedTech is now on…

Twitter

@daedtech

I’ve never really had much interest in Twitter as a personal tool, but in the context of keeping and maintaining a blog, it seems to make sense. So, I’ll use it in conjunction with this blog as a “micro-blog” tool, as well as a vehicle for announcing site posts.

Google Plus

Here is the link to the google plus page: DaedTech.

Facebook

And, finally, the link to facebook: DaedTech.

URL Scheme Changed

Just a quick note here. I decided over the weekend to change the URL scheme to remove the query strings from the URLs. I do lose the +1/Like/Tweet/etc counts in the social media plugin, but that’s the only thing that should be affected. The old URLs with query strings and post IDs will redirect to the new URL scheme, so anyone that has linked here or any trackbacks that appear should still be valid.

If anyone reading has an issue along these lines, please leave a comment here or drop me an email, and I’ll see about getting it straightened out.