Over the next month or so, Feedburner (the primary creator of “feeds” that allow people to use RSS Readers to received updates from blogs) is requiring bloggers (not subscribers to blogs) to manually “move” their feeds to a new account with Google.
I just made the move. They say that subscribers shouldn’t notice any interruption, but, based on complaints in their “help” discussion group, it sounds like it hasn’t gone smoothly for everyone. For example, the number of subscribers that show-up in the stats for this blog went down from 2,300 to 1,200 overnight — though Feedburner did say one should expect a drop for the first week. Supposedly, though, everybody is still receiving the posts, even though the statistics don’t show it.
Please let me know if you stop receiving new posts from this blog — either by RSS Readers or email (if you subscribe via that route).
I really don’t understand why they couldn’t figure out a better way to do this.
I’m sure that Sue Waters at The Edublogger (in my mind, the source of all technical blog wisdom) will be writing a post about this sometime.
I want to re-emphasize that only the “owners” of blogs are having to deal with this — subscribers don’t have to do anything — except let bloggers know if Google is screwing-up the transition.
Based on the discussion in their forum I think that the feed is working properly and people are receiving the posts but that it isn’t accurately measuring the numbers. From their discussion it indicates that they aren’t measuring Google Reader subscribers but I could be wrong – if that was the case no wonder numbers dropped so much.
Will keep an eye on the situation and keep you updated.
Good news is I am receiving your feed through Google Reader.
I just tried to move my feed over but got an “error 403”. Could be that the system is overloaded. Anyone else having trouble? I notice in the FAQ that you have to have an adsense account in order to do it. Haven’t had any communication from Feedburner – maybe that’s still on the way. The deadline for the changeover is February 28th.