Google is out there giving me the Luigi Death Stare on yet another front.
He means business…
It is interesting to see how much Google affects traffic at my site, and how much changes they make at their end can cause that traffic to ebb and flow. They change their rankings of results, they decide to cache images for Google image search rather than going to your site, they shut down things like Google Reader, all of that has had a noticeable impact on the number of page views here at The Ancient Gaming Noob.
Currently, the big variable in daily traffic is search engine related. Unless somebody links in me a post on their own blog, the rest of my daily visitors are pretty regular, a lot of them coming from the much coveted (by those of us using WordPress) blogroll side bar widget that Blogger offers.
I love that feature. It works.
While the static blogroll in my own side bar barely generates any traffic for other sites, that Blogger widget that shows you who has a fresh post up, that actually gets clicks.
So I was a little bemused when that wonderful widget stopped working last week.
It didn’t go away or completely break, it just seemed to stop picking up new post for me.
If you went to one of the sites that uses that sidebar widget… Blessing of Kings, Player Versus Developer, Greedy Goblin, Herding Cats… right now, as I am writing this on Saturday, August 2nd, it would tell you that my current post is the one from Wednesday, July 30th.
Basically, nothing new to see at TAGN, don’t bother clicking! And that actually has an impact on page views. The sites I mentioned actually send me some regular daily traffic.
Not that page views are the most important thing in the world. But I like people to know I’m active at least!
Normally I would just blame this sort of thing on WordPress. They like to break things, giving me a supply of site related fodder for my month in review posts. Most people use the default RSS feed that WordPress provides.
Only I was not having a similar problem with Feedly and other, non-Blogger sites, like EVE Bloggers seemed to be having no problem at all picking up my latest posts. And the feed itself looked okay. So it was time to experiment.
I was able to enlist Bhagpuss and the blogroll at Inventory Full for this.
I have two RSS feeds for this site. One is the default WordPress feed and another goes through FeedBurner, yet another Google company. I was wondering if Google might be more inclined to find my updates if they were coming from FeedBurner.
And it looks like they are. Go to Bhagpuss’ site and it shows my current post. Probably this one at the moment. All of which is double strange, since the FeedBurner feed is actually generated from the default WordPress feed. But Google seems to like it when FeedBurner sends them updates.
So here is my plea to my fellow bloggers using that blogroll side bar widget:
Can you swap over and use my FeedBurner feed? It is linked there and at the top of my side bar.
Thanks!
PS Occasionally somebody mentions that something is wrong with my feed, the it suddenly spew out a bunch of recent posts flagged as new again. While WordPress controls that feed (so I cannot do much) you might try the FeedBurner feed as well to see if the problem goes away.
PPS I don’t have to explain the whole syndicating/syndic-hatin’, Rollin’ Dirty, Luigi death stare thing, do I?
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
That worked! Now I get all my free ice cream as soon as it’s made.
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@Noizy – Thanks!
I see that several other blogs have updated the feed as well. I told Bhagpuss I just needed a snappy blog post title to get the word out, not realizing that I might actually be right.
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That is one heck of a post title. You really outdid yourself there. Glad to have helped (not that I did much – cut&paste really isn’t that much of a challenge).
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I find the side-bar gets cached often, especially on aggressive bandwidth-saving programs like mobile Safari on my iPad. I often have to forcibly refresh the page to flush the cache and get an update sidebar.
Also, every once in a while the widget just… Misses a post. I’ve had it where I published a post, nobody’s feed got updated, so took it down and reported, and boom, magically updated. I haven’t figured out the rhyme or reason for that one.
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@Talarian – Yeah, but it probably isn’t cached three days in, viewed on four different systems, across a number of blogs. (Including my own placeholder, which I suppose I could have used to experiment with. I always forget it is there.) I’ve seen it hiccup and miss a post, but lately it has been going for days between posts… just on my blog. Or blogs. Seems to be the case with my other blog as well. It is a strange bird.
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Snappy title success! How could I not click on that..?!
I changed the URL on Herding Cats and it looks like TAGN is updating again!
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Pingback: Farewell Wildstar | Tales of the Aggronaut
Things I may or may not care enough to do. (Leaning heavily toward ‘not care’).
Stupid WordPress.
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@SynCaine – Looking at Blogger, your feed is not having any problems. However, both of my feeds are. Blargh!
And I know that the moment I get annoyed enough about this to start pestering other bloggers to please change the feed they use, the problem will go away.
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