I’ve been away, did you notice?
I didn’t realize how dependent this column was on RSS until last week when my RSS feed abruptly disappeared. I’ve spent a week now trying to get it back just until I can move to a new service. So, quick like a bunny, please head over to FeedBlitz and resubscribe before this thing breaks again.
We’ve used Feedburner since back before it was owned by Google. But FeedBurner apparently didn’t fit with Google’s Apps strategy so they announced awhile back that the service would be shutting down. Feedburner wasn’t ending instantly, but we had to go, and soon.
About the same time Google Apps asked me to switch subscriptions or add a subscription. Anyway, something was confusing the system and it wanted me to add an identity, which I did. And that’s when my RSS feed disappeared.
The column feed went away, but the comments feed somehow remained. That isn’t supposed to happen, either. Looking deeper, it was the Feedburner account identity that had disappeared. The RSS feed, itself, was .intact, but it was no longer associated with me. Great.
Jennie, my web mistress, went to work. You can’t find better than Jennie (she’s weblamb.com) who gamely suffers my occasional idiocy. But for once this wasn’t my fault.
Jennie couldn’t fix it, so I became a paid Google Apps customer to get support, but they wouldn’t help because it wasn’t apps support I was seeking but Feedburner support, which doesn’t exist. Catch-22. So I asked some friends at Google to help and they tried and failed, too. My FeedBurner identity was like a ghost from Ghostbusters — there and yet not there at the same time. Just add ectoplasm.
As Jennie just explained it to me: “btw, we had two separate problems going on here, one was that your FeedBurner account with Google seemed to disappear, and two was that the native feed was broken on your site. The two issues do not appear to be related as the Google feed was lost first.”
In the meantime I’d written a couple of what I thought were pretty interesting columns that were getting only a few comments each because the big commenters are apparently on the RSS feed. Here I was being all clever for a change and nobody knew.
Our goal was simply to transition from Feedburner to Feedblitz, my new RSS service. Ideally we would import the FeedBurner list right into Feedblitz and nobody would even notice. Alas, it was not to be, because without access to the now lost identity, there was no subscriber list to export.
Then a couple of hours ago FeedBurner came back to life. It certainly wasn’t anything we did. And there’s no telling how long it will last since nobody inside or outside of Google even knows how it continues. So the sole purpose of this particular column is to ask everyone who wants to keep reading these columns to please please head over to Feedblitz and resubscribe.
One more thing… this link is primarily for my 5000+ email subscribers. If you are subscribing to the feed directly, you will still use cringely.com/feed.
Thanks.
I never experience any problems at all. Call me old fasioned, but I just sit at my desktop, click on my “Cringely” shortcut and there you are. Always. Easy.
Ditto. As simple as visiting the website every now and again during lunch.
I third the motion! 😉
Make that four!!!
That’s what I did on my umpc (5″ screen) until the recent web site revamp. The new site makes it hard to zoom in. It’s great that it zooms and word wraps to avoid horizontal scrolling but the text only uses 2/3 of my screen’s horizontal capacity. I can fix the article itself by using Readability, but Readability doesn’t do the comments. Without readability-like zooming, threaded comments move to the right eventually hitting the right side barrier, until all you see is one letter per line. Now following the comments is difficult or impossible. Feed readers are no help.
I guess my comments were premature. Now that the website revamp is complete it works perfectly. Thanks Bob!
Where’s the actual RSS feed? The feedblitz link you provided asks for my email address and insists on updating me via email or twitter or other such obnoxious, privacy violating mechanisms. Why do I need to tell you who I am just to know when you post new content? I’m only interested in an http accessible RSS feed so that I don’t have to ‘subscribe’ to anything other than to tell my RSS reader to let me know when there is new content. Without that, I guess I’ll be living without your content in the future – at least until it appears as a link elsewhere. I have an app for consuming RSS. I don’t need it showing up in twitter or facebook.
Look at the source code for the page. Like any WordPress-based site, it’s just /feed/ at the end of the domain.
Sorry to avoid the metric advantages of Feedburner, but I’ve been subscribing directly to the site’s actual RSS URL for years now. Works like a champ, even if I have to use Google Reader to get at it.
In much the same way, I never bought in to Apple’s OS X servers, I never believed in Feedburner. Just one look at the system years ago showed that Google had no plans to keep it around. No idea why they bought it in the first place.
Yep, no feed burner for me. I just go to your website once a week or so. If there’s something new, I’ll read it, if not, just come back next week. Your articles are interesting, for sure, but not earth-shatteringly important enough to give my personal details to yet another faceless company.
Amen, brother/sister.
I’ve just subscribed to your native feed at cringely.com/feed
I’m not sure what you think of that, since it doesn’t give you access to stats about who’s using your feed, but it’s simple and safe. I don’t particularly need anything else, and I don’t particularly want to sign up for FeedBlitz.
Even when using cringely.com/feed, the articles are tagged with google analytics, so there is no real loss of statistics.
There’s a direct RSS link on Feedblitz under the RSS icon..
No need to give any details or whatever you’re afraid of.
http://feeds.feedblitz.com/ICringely&c=0 for the ones who still can’t spot it.
feedblitz does that obnoxious thing where it decides that you are viewing the feed from the browser and so provides it as HTML instead of RSS (XML). I need the RSS feed to be supplied as RSS at which point a browser extension detects it and lets me add etc.
Or, click on the link he provided, then click on the little orange RSS icon to the right of the “I, Cringely” header (but way above the more prominately displayed login stuff), then on the right side under “Subscribe to get automatic updates” click once more on the RSS icon.
Bob, you might be missing out on some ad income since the rss feed contains the full content of the articles. So I don’t really need to click through to your site to read the article.
I commend Bob for doing that. There are some many sites that now only provide a headline, or maby a few more words into the article in the rss feed. I see no ads on http://www.cringley.com in any case.
Hmm, I thought Cringely used to have ads. Could be my imagination, I tend to ignore them anyway.
I use Firefox as a browser.
I click the rss logo on this page, brought me to another page that had amongst the content another box saying : Subscribe to Get Automatic Updates
I click on the rss logo again.
Firefox has a pop up that asks: Subscribe to live bookmarks, I put it in with all my other bookmarks.
Under bookmarks, it has an entry for I,Cringely.
curser over it, you see the titles of the last 10 entries Bob submitted
Just that easy, I know when there is a new story to read without going to the website, it’s right there in the bookmarks. And I DID NOT have to sign up or enter any information what so ever.
I do this with a lot of news sources so I read headlines, if I’m interested, I go click the bookmark, it goes to that page and I read.
Very Fast, very efficient , very effective, and very private.
IE has something similar. An orange icon lights up when a web page has a feed. Click to subscribe and optionally display it in the Favorites Bar in the browser window. The problem was that cringely.com/feed was not working until recently.
So you must not be using a feed reader yourself, or you’d have noticed when your own posts stopped appearing. Time to start using one?
Also, sorry, but no way am I messing with FeedBlitz, even though I’m one of your most loyal readers. Put you feed on your page, tell me where it is, I’ll plug that into Google Reader.
Or I’ll just read when someone posts about your column on App.net. So far, I’m the main one doing that …
[…] Link. #RSS is an ex-Parrot. BUT, when Google’s ex-Feedburner kills Cringely’s feed his column gets no attention. The attention graph is still RSS dependent. Maybe Cringely should start using Google Reader to track his own column. […]
Weird. Had noticed this happening with several things I’m subscribed to. Guess I should tell them it’s happening when I See it next. :p
Sorry for the troubles. Technology has it’s inevitable downsides.
I too learned the hard way about the cost of depending on feedburner. May I recommend pointing your users to a url like http://feeds.cringely.com/cringely? That way you can switch the backing service out if feedblitz goes the way of the feedburner, uh, dodo.
It is utterly crazy to me the number of feeds I run into with posts like, “please resubscribe to the new location.” Don’t their metrics suffer as a result?
Tjhe link you posted goes nowhere.
hmmm… syndication… and then there’s http://www.cringely.com, which is always up, except when it isn’t, for the usual intertubes chokes and pukes…
For those who still want to use RSS (which Feedblitz doesn’t seem to offer) the direct feed URL is https://www.cringely.com/feed/
Well, I’m not as savvy as most around here so I just wait for the Twitter mention and then head straight over (if I’m on-line) At this point there are usually only a couple or five comments so that’s quick enough for me. RSS? Pah! 😉
Bob, although https://www.cringely.com/feed is fixed, https://www.cringely.com/comments/feed/ is not correct. It shows some comments from the first and second articles in the list, but not all comments and none from earlier articles.
Hey Bob,
The new Feedblitz signup didn’t work for me, got the below message at the bottom. Not sure why generic emails are not supported…. contact@example.com should be relevant. Error is:
This entry was posted in by . Bookmark the There is an issue with your email address. Generic addresses like info@ and sales@ are not permitted. Use a different address.
Start your FREE subscription to I, Cringely … “>permalink.
Bob, please comment on Apple’s decision to drop RSS support from their latest Safari update. It suck turtle rump.
cringely.com/feed still isn’t working for me using netvibes feed reader. I thought you stopped posting after the HP story and only discovered you are still live by accident when I popped over here.
Feed working again now. Great.
We’re a group of volunteers and opening a new scheme in our community. Your website offered us with helpful information to work on. You have performed a formidable job and our entire group shall be grateful to you.