A month or so ago, our Feedburner stats for Lucire’s RSS feed delivery tanked. I put it down to the usual “Google being useless”, because we would have expected to see the opposite. The take-up of Feedburner feeds has usually slowly grown since we started this one in 2007, without any promotion on our end.
I clicked through the Feedburner link on the site this morning to discover this:
That’s not our site. Maybe on seeing the wrong content, we lost a bunch of subscribers?
Now, I did change the ID for the feed, but that was last week, not December 11–12. Maybe I’m naïve, but I don’t expect Google to allow the hijacking of a feed ID that rapidly, since Google forbids, for example, people taking up old Blogger names. Unless they have inconsistent policies between their properties? Or maybe Feedburner is broken and dying—the complaints have been coming for a long time.
Now’s a good time to check your feeds anyway, if you use Google’s Feedburner service, to make sure that they are still serving the correct sites.
The changes did not affect those who were getting Feedburner updates via their email (since I’m on that mailing list myself).
Since I can’t trust Google with anything, we’ve changed our RSS feed to the one natively supported by Wordpress.
You may also like
I don’t think as many blogs/webcomics I follow use Feedburner as much now as when I first started using a feed reader.
Might that say something? I don’t know.
Is it because fewer people use RSS feeds these days? I don’t hear much about them, and when Google killed Reader, I thought that was a sign that the technology was dying.
Maybe, Jack.
But I *need* feed readers, to keep track of the blogs I read across multiple platforms, for webcomics, and so on. I came to Google Reader late in the game, but I didn’t care for it, ultimately.
My tastes are fairly specific and eclectic at the same time. WordPress’s Reader has enough that I don’t like about it just for that blog platform alone.
What else is there? I sense we are comparing apples and oranges as far as our experiences. I am still quite solidly with Linux for the most part, and maybe that forms part of mine– that my computing needs are just very different. I will always look at mobile computers as thin clients, and don’t use them very much, etc.