Time for a bit of blog administrative business, which I suppose I could spin as a Blaugust post, it being related to the issues that come with a blog. Or not. Either way though, it is a post in Blaugust. We’re about half way through the month.
Feedburner Email
I have been advised by Marina at Follow.it that Feedburner is discontinuing its email syndication program. Her company apparently has a substitute service they would like to offer me.
And apparently at some point in the distant past I did post a link for people to get my posts via email. I don’t remember encouraging it at any point after that, but there it is. I have long since swapped over to recommending the WordPress.com integrated email delivery.
So, if you are subscribed through Feedburner and wish to continue getting my blog posts in you inbox, you will need to switch over to the WordPress.com service. It is available in the side bar near the top. Just enter your email address and it will send you a confirmation email that will let you select your preferred deliver method from “immediately on post” (not recommended unless you want to see all my typos), to “daily summary” (I’ve usually fixed a lot of typos by then), to “weekly summary” (which might be a bit too much of me in a single dose).
Feedburner RSS
There was a time when I used to do blog posts about RSS feed. I think RSS is dying interface from a more civilized age now.
While we’re on the topic of Feedburner, I pretty sure I mentioned at some point that the Google had removed email account recovery as an option from the service (and from Blogger). I missed the window for recovering my account and have no clue what the password might be, so I couldn’t migrate their email option over to another service even if I had the inclination to do so.
While Google said that they won’t be shutting down feeds of purging accounts Google, as my wife puts it, “Says a lot of things.” Whether they mean it in the moment is debatable, but we have all learned that promises from companies have an unlisted expiration date.
So I think I am going to recommend that if you’re using a read to read TAGN, that you go with the default WordPress URL, which i:
https://tagn.wordpress.com/feed
I realize that about seven years back I asked everybody to go the other direction, so all I can do is reinforce my change of heart in meme form.
Use your best judgement
Everything will probably be fine for now if you don’t, but if I suddenly disappear from your feed, that might be the immediate cause.
Akismet
Some of you will recognize the name Akismet as the spam comment protection package that comes with… or at least used to come with… WP.com hosted blogs. I reference it in my blog anniversary posts most years to indicate how many spam comments end up here. I even have the counter widget down at the bottom of the side bar.
Well, Akismet was broken on WP.com for a stretch, at least for some sites. That meant rather than about 200 spam comments landing in my spam folder every day I was getting at least 2,000 spam comments to go through, and usually more.
Which means that if you left a comment and it landed in the spam folder this month, I probably didn’t see it. I am pretty good about going through and fishing out such comments, but when the number gets into the thousands, I just don’t have the will.
WP.com took their time getting to things. I sent them a note a couple weeks ago, got a response back about ten days later that referred me to a bug they had opened on the issue, and then they closed the support ticket. The bug got fixed about a week later, which isn’t bad I guess.
But if you leave a comment and it disappears you can always use the contact form on the About page to ask about it. If I know the name on the comment I can almost always find it.
6,000
Also, after writing this I was looking at the stats and realized that yesterday was post 5,999, which means that this is my 6,000th post. Another meaningless milestone achieved.
The Ancient Gaming Noob 
That’s a shame about Feedburner. I haven’t used it lately, but I used to use it on many of my older blogs. I know that RSS is having a time sticking in there, but until that sad day comes, I will continue using my feed readers (as I have for the past decade+ or so). My life would be so much more disorganized without it!
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I’ve never been entirely clear what is or isn’t an RSS feed. I moved to Feedly after Google reader closed down and that still works. In fact, they keep trying to get me to move to a paid upgrade (that does a whole lot of things I would possibly pay them to take away if they added them to the free version, so I’m not exactly tempted). Is Feedly an RSS feed?
Although I do use Feedly every day, though, the majority of blogs I follow I access via my own blog roll. The main reason for that is it’s a ot less fiddly to add new blogs to the roll than it is to get them onto Feedly. Blogger just asks me for the url when I want to add a new one which takes a couple of seconds.
I don’t follow anyone by email although in the last few months I’ve started getting a lot of email updates when someone comments on a thread I alsoo commented on and when someone “likes” a comment I’ve left somewhere (I get the latter from TAGN but not the former, for example). I have no memory of asking for this anywhere and it seems almost random but I quite like it. Again, no clue how it works.
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Congrats on 6,000!
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@Aywren – Feedburner did a lot of notification things that let Google know when you had a fresh post, so it would get indexed. I won’t be trying to pull Feedburner down… as I said, I can’t even log in so not much I can do… but if my account gets the axe I want to be prepared.
@Bhagpuss – I think if you are using your WordPress.com login to comment you can go into the settings and turn off notifications for “likes.” I had to do that shortly after they introduced the feature.
As for what an RSS feed is, it is just a set of structured data that something like Feedly can parse for presentation. Things you read in Feedly are RSS feeds (or Atom feeds, which is Blogger’s version of RSS) while Feedly itself is a reader.
@Halum – Thanks!
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